


Better Living Through Anarchy

by Tlon



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Drug Withdrawal, Enemies to Lovers, Eventually Non-Binary Party Poison, Everyone cries a lot, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Origin Story, Post-Nuclear War, Torture, Whump, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:00:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 14
Words: 35,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27042385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: Gerard Way is the hottest showrunner at the end of the world. In Battery City, he lives for socially constructive entertainment and the occasional tense vidcall with his brother, a veteran of a war Gerard barely remembers. But when an executive with a mysterious new project invites him to meet a captured runner from the wild outer Zones, he jumps at the chance. (Not that he's inappropriately emotional. The pills take care of that.)Ghoul never wanted to see the city again. If he doesn't escape soon, he's going to get his whole crew killed. And some sharp-dressed, unsettlingly pretty interrogator(?) won't stop fucking talking abouttelevision.
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way, Fun Ghoul/Party Poison (Danger Days)
Comments: 53
Kudos: 57





	1. Night And The City

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired mostly by SaskiaK's excellent _[Taking Back Fun Day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15866079/chapters/36961896)_ , and by wanting to write about Battery City culture and the ridiculously tight near-future timeline in the pre-comics canon. Brain drugs! Robots! Rayguns! Let's go.

> _“In free society art is not a weapon, and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul.” - John F. Kennedy, 1963_
> 
> _ART IS THE WEAPON – Better Living Television slogan, 2017_

At 19:59 in Battery City, the sky goes out.

Ambient temperature is perfectly 73 degrees Fahrenheit, just like all the days before. The standard-class workday ended two hours ago, and standard-class dinner has just concluded. Approximately 89 percent of households are watching television.

The radiation membrane darkens. Lights ripple on and curfew billboards activate: DROIDS AND PERMITS ONLY. The wispy artificial clouds evaporate. Ambient temperature begins its nightly drop. And Gerard's medicine cabinet chirps.

Gerard turns off his desk and attends it. He lets the cabinet dispense his evening pill array, a handful of black-and-white capsules: empathy blockers, memory inhibitors, oneirosuppressants... He swallows them automatically and examines his reflection in the cabinet mirror.

Gerard Way: 21 years old, Better Living Television employee, Tier +1. Black hair within male-regulation haircut parameters, just barely. Eyes deep-set, face rounded but sharp, too fine-featured for an anchor or weatherman, acceptable for a fashion reporter or melodrama critic. This is not a matter of personal feeling. It is an objective assessment from a highly experienced and emotionally balanced showrunner: himself.

His watch gently buzzes against his wrist. It's an appointment invitation, unexpected: Chief Executive Televisor Leith, 07:30. The response field is locked, because a Leith meeting is non-negotiable. Most showrunners would be ecstatic (within chemically acceptable bounds) to land one. Gerard has had three, and he's learned to be wary. Better Living Industries executives are better left alone.

There's another hour before lights-out. He could start another scene for Historical TV or finish the season outline for Fantasy. He could call Michael – it's been a while, hasn't it?

Instead Gerard finds himself reaching for the side of his desk, unfolding a grainy printout of a video still. The picture shows a flat landscape with a cracked jawline of ruined bungalows in the distance. A dull shot, unexceptional but for the note Gerard has slashed into one corner in stark pen: ZONE 3.

He studies the photo for a moment and replaces it, walks to the balcony above the high-class residential district. Above him, the membrane paints the sky uniform black. Another screen turned off, another scene ended in Battery City – where the channel never changes.

()()()

Dr. Death-Defying starts the traffic at sundown, a cool nine p-m. _ANOTHER PARADISE DAY IN HELL, CRASH-QUEENS AND MOTORPHILIC AUTOMANIACS. LIGHT RAIN AND A HOT SCENE ON ROUTE GUANO, WHERE OUR ONE AND LEGION KILLJOYS ARE BRINGING YOU A HIGH CHANCE OF ANTI-BIOTICS: THE REAL STUFF, A MURDER-GUARANTEE FOR ALL YOUR SUPERBUG AFFLICTIONS. EXPECT STEADY DRACULOIDS AND SCATTERED SCARECROWS, BECAUSE THEY'RE COMING STRAIGHT FROM THE BL/IND FREIGHT DEPOT–_

Kobra clicks off the radio with his free hand, hanging halfway out the window. “Gotta focus!” he shouts above the roar of rubber on asphalt. “They're still on us.”

He levels his raygun at the closest drac and squints down the barrel, catching it square in the chest. The drac's bike careens into the desert. Only three left.

Jet swerves past a dead armadillo – splatterkill, too flat to eat. “Still there?”

“Where the fuck else?”

“Relax.” Jet turns the radio back on, keeps the volume down on the new Mad Gear single. “Ghoul's got 'em. Ghoul. We got 'em?”

Fun Ghoul wrestles the launcher from behind the seat. He swipes hair from his face and wonders for the hundredth time – why's it never stop feeling so goddamn heavy?

“Ghoul. We got –”

“Yes! Witch. I got 'em.” He kicks the seat and swings the launcher out the Trans Am's roof. The neon sunset almost blinds him – dracs look like black paper cutouts against it. Target practice. His hair whips his neck as he jams the launcher against his shoulder and pulls the trigger.

Ghoul never misses. At least not with a rocket.

One bike explodes and the other flips straight sideways. Jet slams the brakes and Ghoul ducks as the last one wipes out against the side of the Trans Am – its drac flying off like an incompetent trapeze artist.

Ghoul watches the drac's body roll and shrink into the distance as its white suit gathers desert dirt. Nothing is quite clean in the Zones, certainly nothing Ghoul owns... except his raygun and his mask.

He hears Jet flick the transceiver, catches Cherri Cola's callsign. “On our way,” Jet tells Cherri. “Farewell committee's nothin' but dust.”

The sun's almost down and the highway is desolate as a grave. Ghoul drops into the back seat, squeezing between the pillcrates they pulled from a Better Living truck. He and Jet Star and Kobra Kid've hit the depot three times this summer; he's surprised they got out this clean. Cherri can handle the meds from here – sell most to the clinics without Tommy Chow Mein's overhead, fence a few to Tommy for carbon credit and continued good grace.

Stable gig, as Zone lifestyles go. If only Ghoul didn't end every run feeling the same way: like somebody lodged a foot of cold rebar right between his ribs.

“You wanna hit up the Hollowpoint?” Jet asks him, once the crates are safe and Kobra's lost in the ritual of stripping down his gun. “Saw that Zone 5 queen you're obsessed with the other night. Maybe you can finally say hi.”

“Not obsessed. Just said I liked his hair.” Get hung up on too many people in the Zones, you might as well be ghosted already – because chances are, someday they're gonna be. Don't expect to wake up with any face every morning except the fucking sun. “And tonight... think I'm gonna take a drive.”

Jet gives him a look. Ghoul recognizes it – the kind that says _I know you're fucked up and I can snap you out of it, but if you're gonna wallow, that's on you._ Fuck it. Ghoul wants to wallow.

He drives half a zone with a bottle of rotgut whiskey in the passenger seat of the Trans Am. The stars are out when he stops and pulls the cap off, feels the jolt of alcohol start dissolving that cold metal in his chest. There's miles of darkness between him and Battery City, and he wasn't even there, Ghoul tells himself. Barely within the looming shadow of those skyscraper walls. It was close enough.

Kobra knows Batt City and he hates it. Jet was never a city kid at all. Ghoul figures they're both scared of it; that's just how you know you're still human. But then they leave it behind. Neither of them are out here hoping they've got enough booze to tip the world out of balance.

The 'Am's hood is the last warm place in the desert night. Ghoul slides onto it with the bottle and his raygun. No more depot runs, he thinks. BL/ind's gonna start getting wise. Then he takes another pull of whiskey, closes his eyes and feels for a cigarette, hits his lighter's wheel by reflex.

Stable gig.

And by the light of the crescent moon, a murder of 'crows and a patience of draculoids drift across the desert.


	2. The Nightmare Hour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: In a self-constructing skyscraper, Gerard sees horrible things and gets his lucky break.
> 
> B-Side: In the desert, Ghoul gets as unlucky as he's (almost) ever been.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't mean to get the story's single splatterpunk-level gore scene in the A-side of the second chapter, but fair warning, it's there.

> _Don't let pill breaks slow you down. Executive-class citizens qualify for permanent emotional modification. Our cortical lesion surgeries provide all the benefits of Better Living Industries mental stabilizers at the levels required for top performance in today's competitive markets._

Gerard earned his way into making BL/TV fiction two years ago, just after the war. Standard-class citizens get standard-class stuff: daily blocks of recycled soap-opera anime between shopping instructions and corporate hymn hours. High-class citizens get the generative narrative animation channels. And executives... they get what they want. 

The tube discharges Gerard south of the Chief Executive Televisor's tower. It's one of the new self-building ones, still iridescent from metalslug deposits, and Gerard has to wait at the elevator until one of Leith's droids calls him in. She offers a smile that Gerard identifies immediately and dispassionately as false.

“Send him over here.”

The droid flinches, and Gerard follows her gaze. He's never been to this apartment, but besides the moist and glistening screens on its walls, it's the same as every other executive suite. Leith is at the far side in what Gerard supposes might be a dining room, his hands buried in something on the table.

“Well. Which one are you again?”

It's another droid, or pieces of one. The thing's skin has been split down the middle, peeled and pinned to the table like butterfly wings. There's not enough left to guess its gender, but its head tips toward Gerard as he approaches, regarding him with two rheumy, lidless eyes.

“I did the nightmare hour,” Gerard says.

“Right.” Leith clicks his tongue and pulls the droid's head back in place. He lifts a scalpel and begins the peeling process on its cheekbone, layer after delicate layer of pale siliskin. “The VP of eternal security liked that one.”

The layers drape like silk on the table. The droid's mouth opens and closes in rhythm – not speech, only a kind of base entreaty: _notice me._ Gerard makes a note to feed that poetic description to his desk.

“Did you have... another project for me?”

“Of course. I talked to you in the spring about it – over mussels, wasn't it? About...”

Gerard racks his brain. He never gets used to dealing with executives. They think in feedback loops and fragments, care about everything and nothing. Oversee the cultural health of the city and spend their mornings in vivisection. Well... running a business, Gerard supposes, must be complicated.

Then the memory hits him. “It was about the Zones.”

He can't possibly be this lucky. Gerard has been pitching an executive Zones series for a year now. Not the infomercials from the war, but a real dramatic narrative, the kind of thing a standard-class citizen would need rehabilitation after watching.

“Right. The Zones are very big right now.”

“Are they?”

“I'm saying they are.”

Gerard makes a note to check the social analytics, since executives can't conceptualize reality as separate from their own desires – it's what makes them such effective leaders. But for now, he feels the same lightness he gets after winning a BL/TV commendation or finishing a difficult series. Excitement. That's what it's called.

“Is this a greenlight, sir?”

Leith shows his perfect teeth. “It's much better. I have an opportunity for firsthand research.”

“What does that mean?”

“We expect to be, soon, in possession of one or more residents of the mid-range Zones. I'm offering you the chance to interview them before rehabilitation. No censors, no filters. Does that... sorry, one second...”

Leith trails off. He looks past Gerard and gestures curtly, and Gerard realizes that the service droid is still standing beside him. She approaches the table, and Leith rests the scalpel in her hand. “I could use a hand,” he tells her. “You want to get the eyes for me?”

The droid – the whole one – freezes. Her expression is a mix primarily of fear but partly of grief, extraordinarily vivid even on her mechanical features...

Gerard's reading of her falters. Something has crept into his mouth and left a sour taste there. He feels an inexplicable, sudden urge to pull her away from the table and say... he's not sure what, but something that would smooth that terribly interesting terror off her face, something that would wipe the look of smug fascination from Leith's eyes.

But he can't hold the feeling. His mind slips back into detached calm, and he watches the droid lower her shaking hand to those wide eyes. She plunges the scalpel. The room cracks.

Gerard jerks in surprise. The droid on the table twitches with mechanical rigor mortis, the front of its face carved with gaping holes. The scalpel clatters against the floor and the wreck of three mechanical fingers falls with it. The service droid clasps a half-hand to her chest – and Gerard finds that he doesn't want to read her expression this time.

“Isn't that funny?” asks Leith.

Gerard tries to stop his voice from going thin. “What's... what's funny, sir?”

“Their eyes explode.”

For a moment, the room is so quiet that Gerard can hear the building's feed elevator, trickling its silicate into the slug tubes.

Leith laughs. “Never mind. Just keep your watch on, and I'll have our people buzz you when they're ready. Oh – and bring a coat for the meeting. I hear it's chilly down there.”

()()()

Ghoul wakes up around sunrise because he's falling off the Trans Am. He hits the sand and throws up the whiskey and thanks the Witch that he must have dropped the gun before he fell asleep, so at least it only _feels_ like something's burned a fucking hole in his skull. Of course, he's still in the desert with no water and a car that had _better goddamn start_ , and...

He stops. There's a humming in the distance, too rich for one bike or even a single car. Nobody bothers to take this side route, let alone at whatever time in the fucking morning this is, let alone when he didn't tell Jet or anybody else where he was going, which is starting to feel like the inception of a colossal fucking mistake.

Ghoul flattens himself against the side of the Trans Am. He feels up the hood for his gun and gets nothing – just the empty bottle that's been resting precariously above his head. He clutches it in one hand to have the weight of an object that might, under ideal conditions, hurt somebody.

If he's lucky, it's a crew he'll recognize – or at least one that'll recognize him. If he's unlucky it'll be some kid fresh from the city with no manners. And if he's absolutely, critical-miss _fucked_ , it'll be...

Ghoul sneaks a glance around the headlight and sees a flash of white suit. Goddammit. Dracs. No, not just dracs. 'Crows.

He tries to think through where his gun has fallen, but his head is pounding as bad as his pulse. He listens for the crunch of footsteps instead, holding his breath as the first drac rounds the corner. It's got just enough time to snarl before Ghoul drops it with a bottle to the knee and scrambles for its raygun, wondering why everything about them has to be so white, just so _fucking white_ – 

Then the drac jabs an elbow into Ghoul's chest. It's probably an accident, but it's a goddamn unlucky one – knocks the breath from his lungs and throws him back against the 'Am. Another's on him before he can recover, batting away the bottle and wrenching Ghoul's arms behind him. Ghoul slams his head back. But there's nothing to hit except that hideous mask. He can't let himself think about what's inside it.

“ _Fuck_ you!” he screams. “You better fucking kill me, I killed a _hundred_ of you, a fucking _thousand_ – ”

A man's voice cuts him off from behind the Trans Am. “Is that the only one?”

Ghoul strains his head, trying to see him. A 'crow steps out instead, a tall woman with pale eyes and pencil brows.

“That's how it looks.” The woman wraps her fingers in Ghoul's hair and yanks his head back. “Is that right, zonerat?”

“Fuck you –”

“Yes. Of course.” She drops his hair and cracks the back of her hand across his face. Ghoul tastes sweet, coppery blood against his teeth. “I do think it's just him, sir. I can send another squad to find the rest –”

“No. I think they might actually like this better.”

Silence and the thud of boots. And then the man rounds the corner, and Ghoul realizes he's far, far beyond any levels of fucked that he expected to reach today.

The man is tall and bald with hard black eyes. His clothes are as monochrome as anything from Batt City, but not black-and-white – they're gray and strangely ornate, patterned and lace-edged. The kind of thing only a high-ranking exterminator could get away with.

He grabs Ghoul's face and holds it as the 'crow pulls a retinal reader from her pocket. Ghoul closes his eyes, only to feel a sharp point against one lid.

“Open them while you still have two,” the exterminator tells him. The knifepoint lifts, and Ghoul obeys reluctantly, wincing at the light as the 'crow scans him.

“He's in the system,” she says offhand. “But he's not a citizen. Never has been.”

“It wouldn't matter.”

One of the draculoids rifles through the 'Am and pulls out Ghoul's mask. Ghoul starts to scream at it – those _things've_ got no right to touch what's his. But the exterminator stares down at him, and he realizes just how little leverage he's got. The goal is no longer fighting here. The goal is only escape.

The 'crow clicks a pair of steel shackles around his wrists and the dracs push him into the back of a white van. Ghoul lets them strap him in and takes stock of the interior: battered and aging, its cheap chrome-and-plastic seats already starting to go to pieces. BL/ind's goods are never made to last.

He catches a final glimpse of the exterminator getting into a black car that was most certainly not made by BL/ind. Then the van hums to life, and Ghoul feels along the seats until he finds a fragment of real metal holding their plastic molding together. He twists it slowly and silently, stopping whenever the 'crow spares a glance back. After all, it's a long trip if they're going to Battery City.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think shellfish could survive the apocalypse, but I was too busy figuring out the logistics of the _magic brain drugs_ to worry about it. Also, poor Ghoul.


	3. Missile Code Gameshow Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Gerard has certain preconceptions about zonerunners reset.
> 
> B-Side: Ghoul makes Korse's acquaintance.

> _Better Living Industries offers humanitarian aid to all residents of the Western Habitable Region, following a period of mandatory training and rehabilitation. Long-term Zone exposure is known to induce unreasoned aggression, antisocial tendencies, and deviant sexual expression. Find a local informational billboard to learn more._

Leith's people send a one-sheet that afternoon, and Gerard scrolls it on the tube to Synergy Plaza.

The Zonerunner Gerard will be meeting is named “Fun Ghoul.” He's responsible for multiple robberies of Better Living corporate property, considered proficient in demolition and explosive weaponry. There's no photograph, but Gerard can picture exactly how the computer will draw him: hulking and grizzled, maybe a crewcut and a permanent scowl. Life is hard in the Zones, Gerard figures. People age fast. Even ones with absurd names.

Synergy Plaza's twin glass towers practically glow in the sunlight. Gerard has visited the Tower Prime suites on the left for fashion shows and awards dinners; anyone from BL/TV's got a running invitation. He's never taken the long, arched bridge between the two, nor been through the revolving doors of the right one: Citizen Rehabilitation.

A woman at the desk gazes at him impassively and hits a keypad. Gerard looks around the tower lobby as he waits, resting his eyes on a glazed pillar in the center. It opens – discharging a man whose outfit would look flamboyant even on the runway, but whose eyes would freeze the crowd.

“Are you the one from television?” he asks.

“I'm Gerard, sir. Showrunner. Here for research--”

“Oh. That. Well, go ahead.”

Gerard follows him to the elevator column. “It's an honor to be trusted with this, sir--”

“Korse.” The man presses a button, and the door seals. Gerard takes in the clothes more closely: ruffled shirt, paisley vest, long gray coat. Right – he'd been supposed to bring a coat.

“Where are we going? I mean I know it's rehabilitation, but it--”

“It's called the freezers. A secure containment facility for incorrigible cases. Mostly from the Zones.”

“You take zonerunners all the way into the city?”

“When we can. Most won't come alive.”

The elevator drops, and Gerard's watch complains as the signal drops with it. He grasps one of the metal bars for reasons he can't totally explain – he's in no danger, and if he were, Korse is right here to protect him. That ought to seem reassuring.

They come to rest at the end of a blindingly white hallway. The air chills to temperatures Gerard can't even remember feeling, and he rubs his hands surreptitiously to keep the circulation going. Korse doesn't seem to notice. He strides to one of the identical white doors that line the walls, stepping aside to let Gerard peer into a postcard window.

Well. This is not what he had banked on.

Fun Ghoul is in the middle of the white cell, his wrists cuffed tightly to a chair. His feet barely touch the floor from his chair, and he can't be much older than Michael – probably not even twenty. His black hair is stiff with grease and dust, but the face beneath is smooth and almost soft-looking, long-lashed brown eyes focused intently on the door.

“Can he see us?”

“One-way glass.”

“Can I go talk to him?”

“Isn't that why you're here?”

“I – yes. Of course.”

Korse taps a keycode, and the door swings open. Gerard steps inside, reminding himself that the hairs of his arms are standing on end only because of the cold. The door slams closed.

“Who're you supposed to be?”

Gerard ignores the question and takes a closer look at Fun Ghoul. For all his youth he's horribly scarred, Gerard thinks for a moment. Then he realizes it's not scars, it's ink – all down his forearms and at the edge of his thin shirt collar.

“Where did you get those?” he asks.

“I'm not telling you anything. You're wasting your fucking time.”

“No – no, I think this is interesting.” Gerard eyes the bright lines on one arm. “I'm Gerard, by the way. You're... Fun Ghoul, right?”

“It's your prison. You think you got the wrong fucking room?”

“I've never been here before. I'm a showrunner,” he says. “I work... I work in television.”

And Fun Ghoul... Fun Ghoul laughs. Gerard shoots a look back at the door, but nothing has suddenly appeared behind him – it's just them.

“What's funny?” he asks.

“You _work in television._ What the fuck kind of cover story is that?”

“It's not a cover for anything.”

“You do this in the Analog Wars? 'Hi there, welcome to Battery City's latest gameshow, _Tell Me Those Missile Codes_!'”

“Look, just let me give you the elevator pitch. I've got a limited-run drama for an executive audience, full creative freedom – ”

A foot catches Gerard in the shin. Gerard yelps at the flash of sharp pain, and Fun Ghoul laughs again – he's like a petulant child. Anger flares lightly against the side of Gerard's chemically guarded thoughts. No. He's bigger than this.

“All right. We don't have to talk.”

Gerard steps clear of Fun Ghoul's boots and presses a finger to his inked arm. The computer obviously won't draw color, but he thinks he can still capture something of the zonerunner's idiosyncratic style – and maybe that's enough to start – 

“Don't fucking touch me.”

Fun Ghoul's voice is sharp and quiet. Gerard ignores it and pushes up his sleeve, following the ink's path. His arm is thin but hard with muscle, and Gerard traces across his dark shirt to his shoulder, eyes landing on a shape against his neck.

Fun Ghoul tries to pulls away. Gerard sighs and grabs a fistful of hair. He holds Fun Ghoul's wiry shoulders against the chair and forces his head back until he can see clearly: a small, black spider, legs stretching across tanned skin.

“You should tell me about these,” Gerard says. “They're aesthetically compelling --”

“What the fuck is _wrong_ with you?”

Gerard stops. Fun Ghoul is looking at him with an expression that reminds him inexplicably of the droid at Leith's apartments. There's more anger in it, but still a kind of confused helplessness, Gerard decides – an utter inability to grasp the situation someone else has put him in.

And just as inexplicably, Gerard finds himself letting go. It's bad form, bad art – this is when he should be pushing harder, trying to get deeper into the zonerunner's head. Instead he steps back.

“Nothing's wrong with me,” he says. “Nothing's wrong with me at all.”

“You're a fucking psychopath. That's what you all are here.”

“We're emotionally well-balanced.”

“I'd rather be _dead_.”

Gerard looks at the door. He's not admitting defeat, he tells himself. He just needs to go home and synthesize this new information. That's the artistic process. Right?

It's rough.

()()()

When the interrogator leaves, Ghoul tries to think of an insult to sling after him. It takes all his effort to calm down. He can take a punch, but he can't stand the way these people grab him like a toy or a piece of furniture. Jet put it the right way once: _they're biochemically incapable of giving a shit about us._ Although it sounds a lot less pithy and more unsettling when Ghoul's locked to a chair in the heart of Batt City. He can't even remember how he got here – just the 'crow sticking him with something that's made his head hurt worse than before.

The hall outside is silent for what feels like hours. He's almost managed to fall asleep when the door _chks_ open and the exterminator in gray comes back. Ghoul swallows his fear and lifts his head.

“Was that really supposed to work?” he asks.

The exterminator unbuttons his coat and peels it off his shoulders. Still silent, he begins rolling up the lace cuffs of his sleeves.

“Send your Mister TV Showrunner back whenever you want, man, at least he's prettier than whatever the fuck you are --”

“Korse.”

Ghoul stops. “What?”

“My name is Korse. _Whatever the fuck I am_ is head exterminator.”

“I don't care what you are. You're not getting anything from me.”

Korse adjusts his sleeves. He looks at Ghoul without an ounce of the strange curiosity the interrogator gave him – only undisguised contempt.

“Please. Tell me. What do you have that I would want?”

Ghoul holds his tongue, wondering if the man is baiting him.

“No, really – what is it? The coordinates of a radio station? A few boxes of obsolete rayguns? Convince me there's anything in your head that matters.”

“If I'm so useless, why're you here?”

“I didn't say you were useless.” The door opens and the 'crow wheels in a tray of... fuck, Ghoul doesn't want to name everything on it. Korse steps aside and she picks up a syringe, tapping its side with a sharp nail.

“Is the audio on?” Korse asks her. “They should hear him scream.”

The 'crow nods, and the fear grows in Ghoul's chest.

“Who should hear me?”

“Your friends,” Korse says. “They'll need a good reason to come get you.”

“No.” Ghoul spots the mirrored camera shield in the corner and shouts at it. “Don't you _dare_ come here! I won't go with you, I won't even fucking talk to you--”

The 'crow backhands him again, and Ghoul feels his teeth gouge the side of his mouth. She grabs his arm and slips the needle in right where the interrogator touched it, and Ghoul meets her empty eyes as his heart starts to race.

He screams first at the shock gun jammed against his body again and again, each mind-splitting jolt a lifetime. Nearly passes out at her weighted fists against his ribs, but whatever's in his veins won't let him. His stomach fails him when she grabs the pliers, and he gags bile down his shirt as she rips the nail from one finger, places it carefully aside. He slumps away from the camera, but Korse grabs his sweat-soaked hair and lifts his head to face it.

“This is the beginning,” Korse says, and Ghoul knows the exterminator isn't talking to him. “We can keep him alive for weeks.”

Ghoul tries to speak again. All he can manage is a ragged moan.

A pair of dracs unstrap his hands and cuff them back together. They drag him to another cell and hose the sweat and blood from his clothes and leave him shivering violently on the cement floor. He doesn't see a camera, but that doesn't mean there isn't one – and he can't see too clearly anyway.

Jet and Kobra have to know it's a trap. They know BL/ind as well as anybody in the Zones. They've got the savvy to cut him loose. Then Ghoul imagines watching one of them in that chair and wonders if _he'd_ be able to do that. All those depot runs – easy to feel invincible out in the desert, like getting into the city's just a step away.

He fumbles through the pockets on his jeans, hoping the 'crows didn't look too close while he was out. The sliver of metal is still there. He works it out cautiously and slips the point into one cuff lock, closing his eyes and feeling for the click.

If he wants to save them, he has to get himself out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the point where I started having to seriously figure out what the hell the Analog/Helium Wars were, kicking off the process that led this story from "music video canon" to "music video and comic and promo Twitter feed and maybe-fanon Tumblr lore posts" canon. At least we're almost through with chemically!induced!psychopath!Gerard after this.


	4. Security Concepts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Gerard calls his brother and makes a risky pharmaceutical decision.
> 
> C-Side: A wild Jet Star appears.

> _Better Living means better security concepts. In 2015, our highly trained extermination forces secured Battery City's energy supply from Zone terrorists without losing a single soldier. The Victory Tower Pavilion is open to the public outside mandatory sleep, work, and commercial consumption hours._

Gerard plays out the scene with Fun Ghoul in his head as he takes the tube back to high-class residential. _What the fuck is wrong with you?_

His response was right: nothing. Medication mix impeccable for his employee class, work delivered on time: a full season of Reality this week, a bespoke special of Romance the last. All of it drawn and written in perfect synergy with BL/TV's narrative computer system, triple-distilled into wholesome morals and reassuring tropes. Like the pure-filtered alcohol executives offer at launch parties, which Gerard is too well-adjusted to touch.

The apartment is spotless; the tower cleaning droids must have come through. Like he does every time, Gerard furtively checks the space between desk and wall – feeling until his fingers catch his printout.

It's not technically illegal. Everyone at BL/TV used paper backups during the war, when the occasional blackout could eat a day of file transfers. Joked about it quietly: _guess the city battery ran out._ His team had kept a lookbook of recon photos to draw their propaganda from. It was all earmarked for burning after armistice. Gerard's still not sure why he ripped that page from it, except that he liked its strangeness – so much open space, such unconcealed decay.

Purely aesthetic appreciation. Just like with the zonerunner's tattoos.

He turns his desk on and draws a few experimental lines on a fresh canvas. The computer guesses his intent and fills a human figure: male-regulation haircut (64% higher demand for male protagonists this season), tall and gracefully posed (current shopping keyword: _elegance_ ).

Gerard zooms the picture and touches his stylus to the figure's neck, trying to remember the spider's size. He sketches an oval and slashes some legs around it. When he lifts the stylus the lines are gone. He tries again. The canvas throws an error.

“It's not a mistake. It's a picture. _On skin._ ” He sighs. “Turn on executive design mode.”

_Executive design mode is not currently authorized._

Of course. Leith hasn't sent down his greenlight, probably too busy finding novelties to stave off his famous boredom. Gerard is stuck with the censored templates, and they'll all be useless – won't even let him draw Fun Ghoul's hair unless he flips the gender.

It's for the best. Without limits, some showrunners lose sight of their common goal: _support and uplift the citizens of Battery City._ Executives and their whims are the exception.

He turns the desk off. He doesn't feel like supporting the citizens tonight, but he can at least show some support for family.

Gerard doesn't bother checking the time before he calls Michael. His brother never leaves the veteran's home and barely seems to sleep – Gerard never asks what he does all day and Michael never volunteers it. He answers his phone with the usual indifference, face sallow and perpetually pinched.

“Been awhile.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I... I was just thinking of you. Figured I'd call.”

“I noticed.”

Gerard laughs nervously. He's suddenly remembering why he put this off so long.

The last time Gerard met Michael in person, he was in sharp exterminator whites after his final mental fitness assessment. BL/TV sent the city's first soldiers off with a special, and Gerard made sure to get him in the shots – although he looked the same as all the others in their smiling masks. He got his first call from the home after a long year of silence, and if he felt something about the fact that his brother would rather live among strangers than come back to him, the pills made it difficult to name.

“What's up lately?” he asks.

“Same as always. Still doing television?”

“Yeah. I...” Gerard hesitates. “I met a zonerunner today.”

He watches the tablet screen carefully. They've never talked about Michael's time outside. But when he speaks, it's with more presence than Gerard has heard in months. “A zonerunner?”

“They brought him in this morning.”

“What's he like?”

“He's irritating.”

Michael laughs – how long since _that_ happened?

“Where do they even keep a zonerunner in the city?”

“Rehabilitation center. I guess he'll be out eventually.” Gerard wonders what they'll do with Fun Ghoul's tattoos when they rehabilitate him. There must be a process – he's never _met_ a recovered zonerunner, but the city must have them. “I'm talking to him for a TV show.”

Michael nods silently.

“Hey. We... we should meet up sometime,” Gerard says.

“Yeah. For sure.”

It's the same answer as always, and Gerard knows Michael will never follow through with it.

The Helium Wars are a footnote in Battery City's culture. An obscure resource management dispute and a few months of propaganda and inconvenience and a memorial nobody visits. If Gerard hadn't worked on the propaganda he'd have probably forgotten them. So there's no name for his ill-formed concerns about Michael – the vague feeling that his brother has come back wrong. Because nothing, by definition, could be wrong.

Everything is in its place in Battery City. There's nowhere else for it to go.

His cabinet calls. He says goodbye to Michael and takes his pills from the dispenser. Then, barely admitting what he's doing, he checks the tiny number printouts on their sides.

BL/ind pills are supposed to be indistinguishable. Among creatives, though, it's an open secret that 419s are the empathy blockers. Every showrunner washes them down the sink occasionally when they need to custom-write a character's motivations or interview a complicated source. BL/TV probably knows about it, but it doesn't look too hard. As for Gerard... he can handle a little imbalance if it gets him closer to his series – and, purely instrumentally, to Fun Ghoul.

()()()

Jet Star's been outside all day and he can feel his face searing and he likes the way it feels because it puts the hurt outside his head.

He stares to the horizon outside Dr. Death-Defying's station, waiting for a bike or car or anything except that endless dead sand. It's as empty as it was six hours ago when Doc put the first call for Ghoul over the airwaves. Jet's seen one car since then: the Trans Am, spotted in the desert by some waved-out motorbaby. Ghoul's raygun in the dirt beside it.

The door opens behind him. It's Kobra, offering a cigarette and dented thermos.

“You're gonna burn,” Kobra says.

“Already did.”

“Staring won't get him back.”

“You fuckin' tried yet?”

Jet relents and takes the thermos. He splashes water across his cheekbones and feels an immediate pang of guilt – imagines Ghoul crawled out gutshot in the desert heat.

“I shouldn't have let him go,” Jet says.

“He can handle himself.”

“So what? He ditched us? And the 'Am? And his goddamn gun?”

“Fuck, I'm not saying... just come inside.”

Jet ignores him. He should have figured Ghoul was off his game and dragged him out to a bar or in for one of their old tapes. He's known him longer than Kobra has, all the way back to the fires. And if anybody's the leader here it's Jet. Even if Jet hasn't wanted it for years. Hasn't wanted it since the war.

He's about to admit Kobra's right – this particular moment he's as useless outside the station as in it. Then a flash of blue and white dots the road. Show Pony.

Pony skids faer skates to a slick stop a scant foot from the thermos. Fae's got a bag slung on faer shoulder, and faer face is set like stone.

“What's going?” Jet asks.

“Newsie got a hail from a fence in Zone 1. A _special delivery_ from inside Batt City. She almost had her guy detonate it – figured nothing good comes from there. But he opened it up... and I think you oughta come inside.”

Jet fights a jolt of panic. “What the fuck's in it?”

Pony chews faer lip. “It's Ghoul's mask. And a tape. And... I don't know. But I think somebody's fingernail.”

All the circumstances Jet could think up – and this is somehow worse than any of them. Because if Ghoul's in the city, Jet's got fuck-all idea how they'll get him back.

He follows Pony inside numbly, squeezing the thermos till his knuckles ache. The tape's an old-school VHS – somebody wants them to be able to watch it. They slot it into one of Doc's banged-up CRTs and hit play.

“Fuck,” Kobra whispers.

It's Ghoul.

He's in a white room and a hard chair in shackles, and even from the grainy tape Jet can recognize his posture, the kind of squared shoulders he puts on when he's fucking scared and trying not to show it. There's no audio, and Jet can almost hear his own heartbeat in the oppressive silence – until it cuts in about a minute later, and it's so much goddamn worse.

At first Ghoul's _just_ screaming as a woman jabs something – a stunstick, Jet thinks – against his shoulder. Then she does it again and he convulses. His voice chokes off and he's got barely time to straighten before the next shock and his body jerks so hard Jet wonders if something broke inside him. His screams are gasping and desperate, and the woman pauses, looks at a bald man in the corner. The man only nods impatiently. And the nightmare goes on.

“Turn it off,” Kobra mutters.

“No. We need to know what they want.”

“They're taunting us. That's all – ”

They both pause as Ghoul tries to spit in the woman's face – and she slams his head back against the chair, and he slumps against his restraints until she hauls him up again.

“You don't have to stay,” Jet says.

Kobra rises silently and crosses the room. _Coward_ , Jet almost hisses. But he comes back a few minutes later with his raygun and oilcloth, pops the battery and begins to wipe it down. 

Ghoul seems barely conscious now – Jet'd think he passed out if not for the occasional flinch before the woman's fists come down on him. The man in the corner of the cell is still watching Ghoul silently. Kobra must have the shiniest gun in the Zones by now.

Until finally the woman grabs Ghoul's fingers and forces him into one final, hideous scream and Jet thinks about that little square of bloody keratin in the package and looks away. Eyes stinging. Insides cold with fear.

_We can keep him alive for weeks._

Jet ejects the tape and stuffs it in a record cabinet before they go outside. He doesn't want anybody else to stumble on it.

“They know us,” Jet says, pacing the scarred parking lot as the sun sets – fuck, Ghoul's torture took that long. “They know we hit them. It's revenge.”

“Who knows. The City's sick. It's all sick games.”

“Then why Ghoul? How'd they fucking find _him_ anyway? Out in the desert in our fucking car – ”

Jet stops. He runs to the 'Am and works his fingers along the undercarriage until he finds what he feared: a dark magnetic box.

“They tracked us,” he says. “We left the car alone because we were so fucking cocky. And they just slipped it on and let us go.”

Kobra points his gun at the tracker. Jet shakes his head. “If they know where we are, they know where we are. We'd just be tellin' them we found it.”

He rubs a hand over his face and realizes how bad he's burned – the skin's almost feverish. But Ghoul's probably lying in a cell somewhere feeling like he got hit by a freight truck. Fucking priorities.

“Where was he, anyway?” Jet asks.

“Rehabilitation center, maybe. Heart of Batt City.”

“I'll hail Newsie. See if she's got somebody in her network – ”

“Jet – ”

“They can scout the area, maybe security's not so tight – ”

“Jet. Don't do this.” Kobra's voice is like ice. “If Ghoul's in the city... he's fucking gone.”

“You heard them. He's gonna be alive for – ”

“Not dead. Maybe, yet. _Gone_.”

“Fuck off.” Jet practically snarls it. Because if he lets Kobra's words get inside his head, they might start making sense.

“No chance we get to him. Less chance we get out.”

“So what? We sit around and wait for more tapes? Let them send us fucking pieces of him?”

“I don't... I don't know,” Kobra says. “But I know the city. Think Ghoul wants us to get ghosted for nothing?”

“I don't care what he wants!” Jet feels his eyes prick with tears. Puts on his mirrorshades. “Call me selfish. Fucking vacant. I'm not letting my friend go out like _this_.”

“People need us here.”

Jet shakes his head. “The Zones always got more runners,” he says. “All we got is us.”

The last sunlight's going out. Soon the Zones'll belong to the snakes the coyotes and the noise devotees making their pilgrimage to the midnight Mad Gear show. Dr. Death-Defying'll sign off and Jet's going to think of a dozen things he could have asked Ghoul to do last night. Course Kobra doesn't know about loyalty in his bones, he's from the fucking city – 

“They'll expect us coming down the Lobby inway,” Kobra says.

“What?”

“We'll send somebody with the tracker. Throw them off our trail.”

“Yeah.” Jet's got tears of relief on his burning face and he doesn't care. He almost apologizes to Kobra for the stupid doubts he never even voiced. “So where do we go?”

“Streetcars under the old city. Shut down way before the fires. Tunnels were graffiti rat heaven.”

“And you were a graffiti rat?”

“Never.” Kobra holsters his raygun and zips his jacket high. “But I bet Newsie knows someone who was.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BL/TV's existence is extrapolated from the [Mousekat cartoon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvgjFiWXNlU). I'm playing down the comic's "they abruptly execute people live on air" bits because I said so.
> 
> Also, Security Concepts is a division of the evil corporation in _RoboCop_. I'm not sure I've seen that cited as an inspiration for _Danger Days_ , but it seems like an obvious reference point, since the plot revolves around building what is basically Battery City in downtown Detroit.


	5. Dying For Television

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: In the city, this counts as a near-death experience.
> 
> B-Side: A catalog of tattoos.

> _We at Better Living Industries have been dedicated to a clean and structured lifestyle since the great fires of 2012. Our urban renewal efforts have preserved a standard of living uniquely commensurate with the expectations of today's most discerning consumers._

Battery City buildings are all precisely the same temperature: a perfect 73 degrees. It makes the transition from the Rehabilitation Center's elevator all the more jarring, and Gerard realizes his hooded last-season jacket isn't nearly warm enough.

Korse isn't here today; they've sent a rank-and-file exterminator. Thank god, Gerard thinks. The empathy blockers must be working their way out of his system, because looking at faces feels strange now – not like the _people_ have changed, but like he's got something to tell them and he can't remember what. The exterminator still reminds him uncomfortably of Michael. But he can handle that.

They stop outside the door to the interrogation room. “You're early,” the exterminator says by way of explanation. “The prisoner will be transferred momentarily.”

Gerard nods, afraid that anything he says will give his imbalance away. They wait in perfect silence as the hall echoes with the thud of approaching boots. Then he blinks, wondering if he's hallucinating.

Two men have turned the corner – but they're not exactly men. They walk stiffly in white suits and their heads are veiled in fright masks, mouths gaping round like open cuts. Each is holding one of Fun Ghoul's arms, and between them it's obvious just how small he is. His steps are slow and halting, and Gerard feels a stab of... _something_. He keeps his eyes on Fun Ghoul while he tries to name it, which is why he's the only one who catches the start of a sequence of events.

The first step is that Fun Ghoul flicks his eyes down to his cuffed wrists. He looks up and stares resolutely at nothing important, but his hands have started moving, left fingers sliding toward his right wrist. They hook its cuff and the latch swings open easily – the fingers catch it before it creaks. His left fist grips the empty cuff like a pair of brass knuckles from the executives' gangster specials, and his newly freed right hand picks up the trick, edging toward one of his captors' guns. And in the moment before his final move, Fun Ghoul's eyes catch Gerard's without fear or anger, only an implicit question.

_What are you going to do?_

Gerard does nothing, and the trick is complete.

Fun Ghoul swings the pistol toward the man who's still armed and fires. The other one reaches for his empty holster – then he goes down too, a ray blast charring his suit. Fun Ghoul dashes toward the elevator and the exterminator turns too late. And Gerard realizes that he's the only obstacle now. He tries to think of something clever to do, but he only freezes, waiting to be either shot or shoved aside.

Fun Ghoul does neither.

He stops and throws an arm around Gerard's shoulder, pulling him so close Gerard can feel the brush of hair against his neck. His withdrawal kicks into overdrive and for one bizarre moment, he's convinced Fun Ghoul is going to kiss him. Instead he slips his slight figure behind Gerard, balances the gun over his shoulder, and whispers in his ear:

“Sorry.”

Gerard looks down the hallway at the faceless exterminator as Fun Ghoul pulls him backwards toward the elevator. And he knows, instinctively, that the exterminator's going to shoot him. He's going to be the first person in Battery City history to die for television.

He said something like that once, didn't he? It's a distant memory that shouldn't be coming up at all. But these are the last moments of his life, and they have somehow slowed so profoundly that he has all the time in the world to retrace it.

It wasn't _television_. This was before BL/TV, maybe before Battery City even existed. He'd have been a teenager, awkward and quiet – probably talking to Michael, the only person he'd confided in... he thinks, because it's so frighteningly hard to remember. He tries putting it together in his head: Gerard Way, not yet a showrunner, somewhere in the vivid mess of the old city, saying to his brother... I think I'd die for...

It clicks. _I think I'd die for art._

What a pretentious, dramatic idiot.

Now he's going to die for art, at least the closest thing Battery City's got to offer, and he's going to die being annoyed with himself instead of angry at the man who shoots him _or_ the one who's using him as a shield.

But the exterminator doesn't shoot. He simply watches as Fun Ghoul hits the button for the elevator, waits for the doors to slide open, and drags Gerard inside.

Fun Ghoul drops his hold on Gerard the moment the doors are closed and backs into a corner, pressing his free hand tight against its clean metal and shakily leveling the gun.

“Fuck. _Fuck._ Where the fuck did they take me?”

It takes a moment for Gerard to realize Fun Ghoul's talking to him. “Um – near Synergy Plaza. District 2 Block 3 – ”

“Okay. Fuck. Never mind. How do I get out?”

“Out of what?”

“Out of the fucking _city_.”

Gerard looks nervously at the raygun – not because Fun Ghoul seems like he's going to shoot him, but because he looks so shaky that he might fire by accident. “I don't know. I've never left.” He takes a nervous breath. “You can put the gun down. I'm stuck in a box with you. And I don't hurt people.”

“You're an interrogator.”

“No. I told you. I make television.”

Fun Ghoul lets his head fall back against the wall. “Fine. Not the city. Just tell me how to get out of this building.” He looks back at Gerard. “What the fuck do you wanna write about us, anyway?”

“I want to capture the _feel_ of the Zones. The ethos. The – ”

The elevator stops.

Fun Ghoul looks at Gerard accusingly. Gerard raises his hands in confusion. “I said I don't work here. _You've_ been here longer than I have.”

The air feels stuffy, oppressive. Fun Ghoul casts his eyes around the room. “There's a vent. We'll bash it open, I'll climb out...” He tries to push himself off the wall, but he stumbles back, and when he speaks his voice slurs. “Maybe _y'll_ bash it open...”

“I don't think there's a way out, Fun Ghoul.” Gerard's own voice sounds strange to himself, although maybe that's because his ears seem suddenly stuffed with cotton. Eyes, too. Not sure how that's even supposed to be possible.

“Call me Ghoul.” Without warning, Ghoul drops to the floor. It makes Gerard realize how horribly tired he is, that he wants nothing more than to slide down beside him.

“They're gonna make me a drac after this,” Ghoul says quietly, examining his gun.

“Make you what?”

“Fuck, if you wanna just like... shoot me... man, I wouldn't be mad. Don't know what they're gonna do to me... between now and then...”

He drops the pistol on the steel floor. Gerard grabs it and stuffs it out of sight in his jacket, worried Ghoul's going to change his mind. Everything's soft-edged now, and Gerard can't tell if it's the pill imbalance or whatever's in the air.

“Just hang on. We're gonna make it,” he finds himself saying.

“That... what people say on TV?”

“Probably.”

“'s fuckin'... 's fucking stupid.”

Ghoul closes his eyes, and Gerard feels an overwhelming compulsion to do the same. In the darkness he feels a hand on his arm – hesitant, exploratory, like a deep-sea creature that's found a shipwreck – no, not like that, he doesn't even know what that's supposed to mean...

“Y'r warm,” Ghoul mumbles. “Ev'ry... thing's so fuckin' cold.”

Gerard tries to answer him, but none of his words make sense anymore. He leans back against the elevator wall and feels a weight rest on his shoulder, and before he can identify it, everything in the world goes dim.

()()()

Ghoul's pain wakes him as an exterminator drags him from the elevator. He looks back and gets a glimpse of the interrogator – no, the TV writer – no, _Gerard_ – still slumped against the wall, and then the 'crow kicks him and his bruised ribs do the rest of the work and he mercifully blacks out again.

When he comes to he's in a new cell that's smaller and somehow even more freezing. There's something heavy around his neck, realizing as he reaches for it that his wrists are bound again, the cuff locks soldered over. It's a metal chain – thick steel, padlocked to a length that dangles from the ceiling.

Stupid. Witch, that was stupid. Not thinking twice before stepping into a locked box in the middle of a prison. BL/ind controls the horizontal. BL/ind controls the vertical.

He's lost track of time. But BL/ind's probably gotten that fucking video to Jet and Kobra, and for all he knows they're stupid enough to be coming for him.

 _They aren't coming,_ he tries to reassure himself. They can hold their own in the desert, with the Trans Am and the back roads and the hope of backup from some other crew. But no zonerunner leaves the city human. _Nobody's coming._ He doesn't want to think about that either. At least he hasn't put anyone in danger but himself, though, if it's true. Well... and Gerard.

When they met he'd figured Gerard wasn't quite human anyway. Everyone in Batt City is wrong; their eyes are too dull and their smiles are mechanical and they hurt people like it's nothing. Gerard talks about art like it's a prison – like he's going to _capture_ Ghoul and show him off in it, like he gets to decide what the Zones are. So what if he's fucking civil. So what if he said something halfway reassuring. He works for a place that Ghoul's not leaving except in pieces or a drac mask.

 _Don't think like that._ He has to be ready for another shot at breaking out. Something will come up. It has to.

The door creaks. It's the 'crow again, looking at him with smug disdain. She grabs a wheel by the door and Ghoul feels the chain tighten. He grabs at it as she forces him to his feet, leaving him gasping for breath as Korse approaches.

“You didn't have a plan, did you?”

“Fuck you.”

Korse hits him across the face. “Right – zonerunners don't bother making plans. You think you'll live forever.”

Ghoul tries to take a swing at Korse. Korse grabs his wrist and twists it painfully, examining the tattoos on Ghoul's arm.

“ _This_ is what you spend your time on.” He reaches into his coat and comes back with a knife – probably the goddamn thing he was holding against Ghoul's eye back in the desert. “Well – let's see them.”

Ghoul tries to pull his arm free, but it's all he can do to stand without choking. Korse hooks the blade under his threadbare sleeve and saws the fabric free, drops his arm and keeps cutting, until his shirt falls to the floor.

“Which one came first?”

“What?”

“The spider? That looks too fresh.” Korse glances carelessly across Ghoul's neck and the colors on his arm. He steps out of sight and Ghoul feels the knifepoint just above the rayguns sketched on his back. “Those? Later-model pistol design. Wartime at the earliest.”

The blade slashes down. Ghoul strangles a scream.

Korse circles around him. “The bird? Maybe. When's the last time you saw one?” He drags the blade through the swallow against Ghoul's hip, ripping its body in half. Ghoul tries to grab the hilt, but Korse catches his cuff chain and pulls his hands down – brings the knife to rest against his chest. Ghoul's pulse quickens.

“No. It was this – wasn't it?”

Slowly, Korse traces the shape. It's clumsy and faded, one of a dozen identical tattoos some long-gone drifter gave visitors in a makeshift refugee saloon years ago. Ghoul'd been breathless with a sense of illicit thrill, waiting for her to ask how old he was, preparing the lie – because in his head he was still, for a few final minutes, _a kid_. Then she'd paused, looking at the half-finished neutron bomb. Asked. _You lose somebody too?_

And she'd finished in silence, because everyone in the bar understood one thing: the bombs were not a memorial, they were a scar. The tattoo was not for remembering what he'd lost. It was for keeping his anger etched over his heart.

And Korse jabs the knife in. “Five years since the fires. We built a new future. You drew some pictures on your skin.”

“ _Fuck_ you.”

This time Korse steps back. He grabs the remains of Ghoul's shirt and wipes the blood from his knife. When he puts it away there's something else clasped in his hand. Ghoul's own lighter.

“I wondered why we had your biometrics. It took a little while to find your file,” he says. “Do you ever wonder how she died?”

Ghoul's heart runs colder. He watches Korse flick the wheel and tries to draw away.

“Give me your hand, or I will break it.”

Trembling, Ghoul offers clenched fists. Korse takes his right hand and uncurls its fingers almost gently. He lifts the flame beneath Ghoul's palm.

“Was she at home when it happened? I looked up your old address. Twenty-fourth floor in shoddy project housing – a shockwave might have crushed the whole thing instantly. The easy way out.”

It doesn't hurt, exactly. It stings. Like holding something too bright with life to bear.

“But _you_ weren't home, obviously. A customer service representative transcribed her call that night. She begged them not to give away your slot.”

The brightness has turned vicious against his skin.

“Maybe she was outside trying to find you. So it would depend on where she looked.” Ghoul's hand is throbbing now, heat radiating down to his fingertips and up his arm. He tries to pull free. Korse is stronger. “If she was close enough to a blast, it would have seared her skin off instantly. A little farther... it could have taken days or weeks. Wandering the rubble. Burning from the inside out.”

He can't feel his palm. He can't move his hand. He can't speak because his voice will crack.

“I'd have thought you knew by now what happens to people when you run.”

Korse snaps the lighter shut. Ghoul snatches his hand back – doesn't dare look at it. Korse grabs his face and forces it up, and Ghoul closes his eyes. He knows by now that it makes burying thoughts easier.

“That lecture supposed to get my crew to come faster?” he manages finally.

“It isn't for them. The cameras are off.”

“Then why?”

“Because you could have been more than this. And you threw it away.”

Korse turns back to the door and hits a lever, and the chain loosens. Ghoul collapses to his knees and then his side, trying to find a part of himself that's not bleeding or bruised or burned. For all he knows Korse was lying and the video's still running; the 'crows might be watching him right now. So he covers his face with his hands as well as he can manage before he lets the tears roll down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That angst tag is earning its keep from now on, I promise.


	6. The Fires And The Void

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Stories from the city, stories from the Zones.
> 
> B-Side: This is the way the world ends. Not with a whimper, but several bangs.

> _Better Living Industries believes the “past” should be just that. In Battery City, live your tomorrow free from the tyranny of yesterday. Please report any illegal memorabilia hoarding to your district's nearest enforcement center._

Gerard makes sure to be late the next day. He sweats out the tube trip in the warmest coat he owns, keeping his eyes down the whole way there. Every passerby's face feels like an invitation now – he starts to imagine where they're from, where they're going, what they'd say if he stepped up and introduced himself. For the high-class ones, the ones the city trusts with pair-bonding and unassisted reproduction, if they'll be going home to anyone tonight.

When was the last time that mattered to him? Gerard has sketched a thousand meet-cutes, always a little different but fundamentally the same, all pointed arrow-straight toward the same happily-ever-after. He's used the BL/ind pairing centers, imitating those perfect narrative beats, writing himself over with one of the suave men from television. Then he's always realized that the man he's writing is more interesting than the woman he's writing for, and that he has no desire to _be_ that man at all. Which is just as well. More time to put new lives on screen.

A dark-suited woman meets him at the elevator, ignoring Gerard's hesitation as he steps inside. “He may not want to talk,” she says as they walk past the interrogation room, deeper into the complex. “Call us if necessary, and we can correct him.”

Gerard doesn't ask what she means by _correct_. He lets her tap the code at a new door, and when it opens, he nearly looks away.

Ghoul is stretched against the floor, his shirt gone and his body purpled with bruises. The cuffs are back and he holds one hand stiffly flat against his jeans, and Gerard can see the full spread of tattoos across his chest and stomach – two split with the reddened, centipedal lines of stapled cuts.

The woman winds a chain beside the door, and Ghoul clutches at his throat as she pulls him to his knees. Not deadly; probably not even painful compared to the rest of him. But Gerard feels his choking gasp like a punch. He considers walking away and decides against it, if only because it might reveal his imbalance to his escort.

The room's chill seeps even through Gerard's coat. He doesn't know how Ghoul can stand it, although the obvious answer is that he can't; his shoulders are shaking and his left hand keeps working against the skin of his arm.

“Didn't think you'd be back.”

Gerard tries not to stare at Ghoul's cuts, slashed straight through the art on his skin, a mutilation. “You took me hostage. I feel like you owe me some good material after that.”

“Thought I'd owe you an apology. I figured – I don't know, you were some kind of high-ranking interrogator. That nobody would touch you.”

“Sorry. I don't think I'm that important.”

Ghoul gives the barest hint of a smile, until he sways and grabs at the chain on his throat again. His eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot, Gerard notices – and he's surprised to notice that it bothers him. The artist can't be derailed by petty emotion. Emotions are for _other_ people.

“Um... tell me about the Zones,” he says, trying to recover. “You – were born there? Grew up there? You...”

He stops. Ghoul has dropped his eyes to the floor, and when he looks up again Gerard ignores the slight glitter in them. He's still trying to pick up the sentence he left hanging when Ghoul speaks nearly in a whisper.

“You wanna hear a real Zone story?” he asks. “Do me a favor and I'll tell you.”

Gerard nods.

“Get me fucking breathing again.”

Ghoul holds his fingers to his neck and gestures at the ceiling chain. Gerard steps back and slackens it, and he drops his shoulders with what Gerard identifies as relief.

“The story,” Gerard says, sitting on the floor across from him.

“Right.” Ghoul rubs his fingers against the raw skin under the chain. “The very first story I got out there.”

“How you became a zonerunner?”

“How I killed my mom.”

Gerard looks at him sharply. Ghoul gives a wry, bitter half-smile.

“You gonna take notes or something?”

Gerard shakes his head.

“Right,” Ghoul says. “So here we go.

“I was born in the old city. Dad wasn't around much, but my mom and I, we made up for it – I didn't really get it until later, how close we were. Everything was getting bad back then, is what Jet – is what a friend told me, I mean. But with her I didn't notice... fuck. I'm fucking rambling.”

He takes a shaky breath.

“It was good. That's what I'm saying. Until I got sick. Woke up one morning and it was like a weight on me – hot iron. And it wouldn't break for weeks. I didn't wanna scare her, tried to pretend it was nothing after a while so she wouldn't miss work, but even my fucking school noticed. And they sent me to BL/ind.

“Batt City was new back then. Tore down a bunch of the old city to build it, but you could walk through its gates and not see a single face except the guards. They kept me there for hours taking tests, drawing blood, all the shit you could do to poor kids without anybody caring. Until they sent me home and called my mom and told her they could _take care of us_. Like that didn't sound creepy as fuck. I go there and swallow their pills like a lab rat and get better, they give her a full-time job and an apartment's not filled with mold and roaches.”

“Did she take it?” Gerard asked.

“What the fuck was she supposed to do? But I didn't see it that way. I knew other kids who did the tests – 'cause they were, I don't know, asthmatic or fat or fucked in the head or anything wasn't perfect. And I knew I never heard from them again. Like once you went in Batt City, you dropped off the fucking Earth. So I begged her not to take me. Got her to push back going again and again. Till BL/ind gave us a deadline: then or never. She packed up everything. Came home with takeout from the restaurant we'd only ever had on my birthday. Told me how great Batt City was gonna be. And then, an hour before the movers got there... I fucking ran.”

Ghoul's voice cracks. His cuffs clink as he rubs a hand across his eyes, and Gerard realizes that his chest is tight as well – that he's dreading the end of the story.

“I felt so goddamn awful all the time, I barely made it to the Metro. Figured I'd ride till it closed and go back home and everything would go back to normal, no more Batt City, no more BL/ind. I practiced telling her I was sorry. Telling her I – telling her I loved her. And the bombs hit while I was underground.”

Ghoul's stopped bothering to wipe the tears from his eyes. He stares at Gerard like he's daring him to say something.

“So that's it, I guess. My mom could be upstairs right now, all shiny happy. The one thing I ever could've done for her. I never even said goodbye.”

Gerard knows what he should say. That Battery City could have made Ghoul better, and instead he chose the Zones. The Zones are death and sickness. What did he expect to happen? It would be rational and constructive to point this out. It might even help Ghoul understand the defects in his personality and speed his rehabilitation. Gerard has no reason not to tell him. Except that Ghoul is sobbing silently now and trying not to show it, and all Gerard wants is to see him stop.

“You must be freezing in here,” he says.

Ghoul ignores him. Hesitantly, Gerard unzips his coat and peels it off. He leans closer and slips it around Ghoul's shoulders, and Ghoul looks up.

“They won't let me keep it,” he mumbles. “You're just gonna lose your jacket.” But he pulls it close around him all the same.

“That's Better Living luxury. You get more than one outfit.”

Ghoul nods slowly. When he speaks again, his voice is a little steadier. “So where were you from?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Before 2012. Before the fires.”

“I...” _I was here_ , Gerard almost says. But he knows that's impossible. He came to Battery City from somewhere, he just can't remember the last time he thought about it – the last time he _thought_ about thinking about it. “It doesn't matter.”

“Do you have a family? Parents? Do they let you remember?”

Gerard pushes himself to his feet. “I have to go,” he says. “I have work to finish.”

“I'm just – shit, I'm sorry.” Ghoul pushes his hair back from his eyes – warm earth-toned, like nothing in the black and white and gray of Battery City. “Anyway, thanks for the jacket,” he says. “I'll try not to bleed on it.”

Gerard hesitates at the door.

“It wasn't your fault,” he says quietly. “Whatever anybody tells you. Don't believe them. It wasn't your fault.”

He leaves before Ghoul can answer.

()()()

They don't take the jacket. It feels like a bad sign, like they must be planning something worse for him, but Ghoul is too tired to care.

He can never sleep when he tries to – the staples dig into his skin and his hand's fat, sluggish blisters threaten to burst. But sometimes reality gets fuzzy and he sees things he shouldn't. His raygun. Cherri or Jet or Kobra. The bombs. The ones he never saw in 2012.

Sure he knows the aftermath. The violent shuddering in the subway, train lights flickering into nothing. Heavy horrible silence like the world might hold together if nobody started to scream. Climbing emergency stairs to station after station, finding only death and rubble, smoke and rot and ozone. Hours walking in the underground, all the way to the end of the line.

A few survivors had tried to stop him – thirteen years old and looked younger, face covered in dirt and tears. He'd ignored them and they let him go. Nobody knew what to do anymore, anyway. A few muttered city names like spells: _we'll go up to Sacramento_ , or _I hear Santa Fe's still standing._ And Ghoul had spitefully hoped they were wrong, because if the bombs had stolen his life then they'd better have fucking taken everything else with them.

He still feels bad about that sometimes.

He had kept walking. Stealing food and water from deserted Dead Pegasus stations as the city gave way to sand, an expanse of desert that scorched by day and froze by night. No longer sure which road he was following or where it led. The stations disappeared and he was still walking, burning until he could peel strips of translucent skin from his arms and face. Until finally he had dropped with no strength to do anything but stare up at the sun, waiting for it to strike him blind.

Instead he'd heard the sound of a dying motor and a voice. _Hey man, you cool?_ And despite everything Ghoul had choked on a hysterical laugh at the understatement of it – and callused hands had helped him up and rested him across the back seats of a Trans Am, and with that he'd met Jet Star.

In those early days Jet would tell anyone who listened that he was gonna be an astronaut. Jet was made for space, might have gotten there if BL/ind hadn't drained the sky of everything but its satellites. Raised in the lunar waste of a dying quarry town, self-taught on secondhand books, as good at fixing a transceiver or an old-world gamebox as a car.

But back then Ghoul hated Jet for talking about the past or the future or anything except the fucking hell of fresh death. In a half-collapsed rest stop he didn't say a word for days, even after water had eased the sandpaper of his throat. Tried to hit Jet when Jet rubbed aloe on his burns, tried to make him mad. Tried to make it back down the highway, collapsed within a mile. Jet picked him up and drove him back.

And now Ghoul's seen him for the last time in a best-case scenario. In a worst-case Jet'll come looking for him, and one more time he will have repaid somebody's love with death. Because caring for _him_ – it's a fucking curse.

Thinking about anybody from the Zones is dangerous, like digging in an open wound. So he closes his eyes and wraps the coat around him, burying his face in its fabric. It's the only thing here that doesn't smell like blood or bleach or fear – it reminds him of going with his mom to clean hotel rooms in the old city, crisp and impersonal. The scent of comfortable wealth.

Thinking about Gerard is safe. He's got no illusions Gerard will risk anything for him – that he's even _biochemically capable_ of it, as Jet would say. So there's no guilt getting lost in a fantasy about the only person here who's shown him any mercy. Like maybe Gerard's as powerful as Ghoul thought he was and orders the 'crows to get lost and goddammit fine he's gonna gloss over the rest of that fucking part because he can't really come up with a decent explanation for it, and then somehow they walk out of the city together.

“And then we'll drive out to the desert and watch the sky together,” he whispers into the empty room. “And you'll be all 'what are those' and I'll be like _stars_ , man, they're called stars, and you'll just be so... so fucking mad. That somebody kept something so beautiful away from you. And we're gonna make up constellations and yours are gonna be all pretentious, but it'll be okay because I'm just gonna end up looking at you...”

Not like he wouldn't have, if they'd met out in the Zones. Gerard's face has a delicate fierceness that even the city drugs can't quite kill. Ghoul tries to imagine what colors he'd wear if he could pick them, how he'd let his hair grow out.

“Anyway I'll look at you and you'll notice and I'll think you must think it's weird but then you'll smile, and fuck I don't know, let's just say you're off the pills or something, so you're basically a different person and maybe I don't think it's weird to kiss you...”

He must be going delirious. He doesn't want to kiss Gerard and for fuck's sake he knows Gerard wouldn't want to kiss him. For all Ghoul knows he's married to some shiny happy woman in the city. He just wants to imagine touching somebody. He just wants somebody not to hurt him. He just wants somebody he can't hurt.

The door opens, and a kick to his side stings too much to be a dream. Ghoul looks blearily at the underside of Korse's lace sleeves.

“Get up,” Korse says. “It's almost time to watch them die.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was ready for some worldbuilding nightmares when I realized Battery City was literally built [right in the center of Los Angeles](https://girlautomatic.tumblr.com/post/1216957562/battery-city-is-los-angeles-and-other-observations), but it turns out this is [not as unprecedented as I thought.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunker_Hill,_Los_Angeles#Bunker_Hill_Redevelopment_Project) Also, emotions: they're miserable.


	7. A Box Full Of Sins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: There's no art school in Battery City.
> 
> D-Side: Kobra. Has. Feelings.

> _Protecting Battery City can be your ticket to a better life. A two-year extermination tour in the Lobby or inner Zones comes with a guaranteed living stipend and expedited approval for unassisted reproduction. Offer contingent on kill count and ammunition efficiency quotient._

Something hits Gerard halfway up the tube line and he barely makes it to his building before it breaks him down.

He's not sure he can name the feeling. It's like a great chasm has opened in the middle of his heart and his mind is threatening to fall through it. And at the bottom is something that will tear him to pieces.

The cabinet beeps. Gerard hits the dispenser and washes down the pills without bothering to sort through them. Then he grabs his tablet and lies on the sofa, staring up at its screen as he dials the veteran's home.

“What's up?” Michael asks. Gerard wonders if he's been outside since he got there – or if he just spends all day staring at those blank walls. The chasm widens.

“Where did we live before the city?”

“What?”

“We weren't born here. We don't have parents here. _Where the fuck did we live?_ ”

Gerard flinches at the tone of his own voice. Michael looks at him curiously.

“Are your prescriptions working right?”

“Of course. I'm just curious. It's for... a show.”

“Are you still talking to that zonerunner?”

“Does it bother you that I am?”

Michael furrows his brow. “Why would it?”

“Because you fought them. Because you never talk about the war. Why don't you ever talk about the war?”

Gerard isn't sure why he's asking. And he isn't sure why he's never asked.

“The war is over. I'm home now.”

“Then why don't you ever come see me?” The chasm is full of things he's never said to Michael and now they're spilling out of it. His eyes feel dangerously close to wet, like he's Ghoul back in that freezing cell, like he's got something to worry about. “Why don't you ever leave?”

“Gerard...” Michael stretches out his name with a sense of unfamiliarity. “Are you sure you're not in trouble?”

“I'm fine.”

“Well, if you ever are... you can come see me. Meet me at the Victory Tower. Anytime. Just say the word.”

Gerard feels the sense of wrongness more strongly. That his brother has come back a stranger, and he can't tell if it's because Michael has changed, or because _he_ has. In the chasm is a part of himself that he can never get back.

“Sure,” Gerard mutters. “I guess we should talk later.”

“I hope we do.”

The computer still won't give him his greenlight. He doesn't want to draw Ghoul anyway. It just makes him think of that stupid, irrational moment that he gave his most expensive coat to a stranger, and that when he did it, he kept thinking about what the stranger's skin would feel like. And, worst of all, that he knew touching Ghoul's skin would only frighten him – because the first (and last, _and last_ ) time Gerard did it, it was to force a story out of him for the city's amusement.

Gerard will always be the person who did that. That's the person Ghoul will always remember, if he remembers Gerard at all.

He makes for the back of the room instead. There's a bureau of commendation trophies and cheap premiere swag, and at the bottom Gerard finds what he's looking for: an embossed fountain pen whose chipped lettering commemorates HISTORICAL TV. He twists the cap and marks an experimental line on his palm. The ink is still wet.

Nobody's kept paper since the war, but Gerard pulls his picture from beside the desk and flips it over. His hand hesitates. The desk is infinitely erasable. Anything he puts on the page is forever – no matter how much he draws over it, the old lines will still be there.

It's going to be a zonerunner. Not his show's hero, necessarily, but someone strong, the kind of person who might not have disappointed Ghoul so badly in that elevator. Name undetermined, gender... Gerard pauses. The computer always chooses that for him, and without its guidance he's not sure he likes the idea of choosing. He'll figure it out later.

He doesn't trust himself to draw faces and so he leaves the head blank, but the hair comes to him: light, messy, too short for female-regulation and too long for male. Pants impractically tight like Ghoul's. Gloves, because everything's probably filthy in the Zones. Shit, he can't draw fingers anymore. He's not even sure the proportions will all come together. Fine. Add a jacket. Covers a multitude of bad angles.

Gerard puts down the pen and examines the sketch. By the tablet's standards it's embarrassing. But it's _there_. Looking up at him with a featureless head cocked and something urgent in the posture. Places to go. Zones to scavenge... if that's accurate, because Ghoul still hasn't actually said anything about what happens out there.

He wonders what Ghoul will be like after the rehabilitation fixes him. Maybe they'll see each other in the city sometime. He... he doesn't like to imagine Ghoul _fixed_ , his half-smile reserved for Comedic TV or pornodroids. But it's an improvement over what he's got now. There's a reason they all work for _Better_ Living. Not _best_.

His watch buzzes. It's another Leith invitation, this one unlabeled and only an hour away.

The chasm grows.

()()()

New mission, Kobra Kid thinks. New box.

Kobra chews gum. Syncs PTTP frequencies with Cherri. Opens the box.

“You don't have to do this for us,” Jet's telling Cherri. “Dracs come in too hot, you get the fuck out.”

Jet hands Cherri the box from underneath the Trans Am. Different box. Physical one.

“You ready?” Jet asks Kobra. Nod. “Sleep at all?” Shake.

“If you're in real bad shape, I can probably dig you up something,” says Cherri. “Cup of coffee, at least some caffeine pills – ”

“No drugs.”

It wasn't caffeine mixed into the exterminator pills – probably amphetamines. No fear. No sleep. Hot rage. Hot blood.

“Right.”

He ever fight Cherri's squad? Cherri wouldn't know. You could do anything in an exterminator mask. Take it off. Nobody the wiser.

Now everybody knows Kobra's mask. His helmet with its painted motto. _GOOD LUCK._

“Good luck,” says Cherri. “Knock 'em dead.”

Cherri means metaphorically. Kobra thinks. Bad word choice.

BL/ind patrols the outer Zones with dracs since the war. Nobody feels bad ghosting those. But inside the city they'll have exterminators. Real people.

Deaths go in the box.

Kobra spits the gum in the sand. “Don't come for our masks,” he says.

“What?”

“Put Ghoul's in the mailbox. Leave ours in the city.”

Jet holsters his guns. “Really inspiring confidence there, Kobra.”

“This is a bad idea.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

He shouldn't. Got Ghoul's death halfway in the box already. Wouldn't be the first.

But.

Three years ago. The Zone 2 high-rises.

BL/ind assigned his squad to clear their ruins. Start from the bottom. Work to the top. Shoot anything that moves. One exterminator, a new one: _Even kids?_ Leader hacked a laugh behind his mask. _Those aren't kids, they're monsters. Raygun trigger doesn't care how old you are. Just look at Way._ And as much as the drugs'd let him, Kobra'd swelled with pride. Sixteen years old. Best aim in the squad.

The really dangerous monsters kept their faces hidden. Killjoys, leader called them. No pills to keep them safe and happy. No neat, reassuring smiles on their masks. Made the shooting easier.

The last building was empty. Kobra got itchy, careless. Looking so hard for motion he didn't see the hole in a top-floor corridor, until it caught his leg like a jaw. Snapped the bone in cement teeth.

Leader sounded almost concerned. _How bad is it?_ Kobra'd growled: _Fine._ Then he'd tried to stand and passed out. Woke up dizzy and alone. Exterminator who can't walk, fifty-two flights of stairs and then a mile to the convoy. Bad value proposition for the company. He took more pills – his last pills – and understood.

The pills got him ten floors down. Deserted apartment. Water and food. Slashed up a set of shabby curtains and tied the rod to his leg. But it took too long. Withdrawal knocked him so flat he couldn't see straight – could barely crawl to cover behind a bank of cabinets. First flies swarming the blood on his leg.

Wounded animal. Waiting to die. He'd been ready to pass out again when he heard the voice.

_Hey! Anybody here? Anybody need help?_

He was still a company man, Kobra thought. Had a job to do.

Gun was dry, but Kobra was patient. Waited till the speaker was just around the corner. Brought him to the ground. Rolled on top and slammed a fist into his foul purple mask. Grabbed his knife and held it against his neck. Then Kobra felt a raygun barrel against the fabric of his mask. He waited for a blast and a blankness that didn't come. Instead the killjoy kept talking.

_Please. I don't want to kill you._

Kobra laughed. Animal snarl. _Monster._

 _No. Not a monster. I swear._ Killjoy took a hand off the gun and pushed his mask up. Wasn't any older than Kobra. Wide dark eyes. Mouth sticky with blood from Kobra's punch. _Ghoul. My name's Ghoul. Fun Ghoul. What's your name? You have a name? Why don't you just take off the mask, we'll talk this through, I bet you feel like shit –_

It would have taken Ghoul one shot. Wouldn't have even seen Kobra's face when he did it. But he'd pulled the gun back and slung Kobra's arm around his shoulder, helped carry his weight down all forty-two of those floors.

“Sorry,” Kobra mutters to Jet. “Let's go check with Newsie.”

Newsagogo puts a pin in the map on Doc's wall, real animosity behind the stab. She talks about the old city when she's riffing in her midnight radio show. Against BL/ind, journalism's her ammunition but nostalgia's the gun. “Tunnel starts at the edge of Zone 1 – gotta blast a door open, but I assume Ghoul left enough goods for that.” She slides another pin across the black circle of Batt City limits. “It comes out at the old terminal building.”

“It's called Synergy Plaza now,” says Kobra.

Newsie grimaces. “Well, if Ghoul's where you think he is, you got about a 200-meter fight from the end of the tunnel. Each way.”

“If we get up the transit tower there's a bridge to rehab. Local security uses it. Takes us right to the panopticon.”

“The panopticon?”

“The perfect prison.” Jet's got the flat read-aloud tone he uses when he learned something from a book. “Guards see the prisoners. Prisoners don't see the guards. You never know when you're being watched –”

Kobra shrugs. “The panopticon's just the rehab security center,” he says. “I guess the prison's all of Batt City.”

The Trans Am is packed with Ghoul's last dynamite. Time to break back into jail.

“You ready?” Jet asks Kobra as he gets behind the wheel. “I don't know... don't know if there's anybody you still know in the city.”

A part of Kobra wants to tell Jet he was lying earlier: he slept last night just long enough to dream. And in the dream he was back in the Zone 2 towers, and it was him wearing Ghoul's mask. Couldn't stop walking toward the cabinets, even though he somehow knew an exterminator was around the corner. And knew exactly who it was. 

Kobra hasn't seen his brother since he left for the Zones. He barely remembers Gerard's face. But in the dream he recognized him instantly even in a mask.

And in the dream, Kobra had pulled the trigger.

“Nobody I'm gonna meet,” he says.

Put it.

In.

The fucking.

Box.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The tunnel here is the real [Belmont Tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Tunnel/Toluca_Substation_and_Yard), part of the Pacific Electric Railway that was decommissioned in the 1950s. I had to fudge the Battery City map a tiny bit to get its entrance in the Zones, but it's surprisingly close!


	8. TV Party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: I wouldn't be without my TV for a day.
> 
> B-Side: Or even a minute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The attempted dub- and non-con warning is for the B-Side of this chapter.

> _Better Living Television is a responsible employer. Our fictional narrative products have featured no filming of humans or humanoids since 2015, using computer-aided animation to save countless actors from the dangers of simulating cognitive trauma or unproductive emotions. Remember: a fake frown uses just as many muscles as a real one._

Gerard digs Leith's number from a BL/TV directory, but it's not Leith's face that comes up when he dials; it's the service droid from his apartment.

“Oh. Mr. Way. Is there something I can do for you?”

Her voice is perfectly even, but Gerard catches a pause before his name. He looks into her eyes through the screen, and he remembers the flayed droid and the scalpel. Suddenly he can't speak – can barely breathe.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Way. Maybe we have a bad connection – ”

“What – what am I being invited to?”

The droid doesn't miss a beat. “A watch party. Mr. Leith has organized exclusive live coverage of a terrorist incursion on the city. And the ensuing executions.”

“Incursion.” He doesn't want to touch _executions_.

“The associates of a zonerunner codenamed 'Fun Ghoul.' Mr. Leith believes they are attempting a retrieval. You are, I believe, one of only two non-executive guests on the list. An honor.”

Gerard's heart pounds. He understands suddenly why BL/TV could send him to the rehab center. It's a throwaway aside to satisfying Leith's boredom. Find a zonerunner. Lure his friends into the city. Let the executives watch as the exterminators hunt them down.

“Take me off the list. I don't want to... I don't want to see it.”

“Mr. Leith believed it would be valuable for your research.”

He doesn't even like the way she says _research._ It feels like an accusation. _Crack. Clatter. Fingers on the floor._ What is this feeling? Guilt. It's guilt. Bitter and smothering.

“Anyway, can I put you down for – ”

“Did he fix your hand?”

The droid looks at him cautiously. “Fix... how, precisely?”

“Did he I don't know, repair it or um...”

The droid lifts her hand into frame. Its two outer fingers flex. Everything beyond them has been smoothly sheared away – edges of skin fused over it without so much as a scar.

Gerard makes himself hold the droid's gaze. Her level, weary stare pierces him.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

“Sorry he did it?”

“I'm sorry – I'm sorry I watched. I'm sorry I didn't do anything. I'm sorry – if I could've – I didn't help.”

The droid glances back into an empty room. “What difference does that make?”

“That I'm _sorry_! That I feel _bad_ about it! Doesn't that _count_ for something?”

“I'm not sure,” she says. “I suppose it might make you feel better.”

She has to understand – he _has_ to feel better. The guilt is too heavy to bear. He's not due for pills for an hour even if he wanted them, and he's... he's not sure he does. Because all the Gerard Way of _right now_ can imagine is standing by some new horror and looking on with that monstrous detached curiosity, watching the city hunt down the zonerunners or listening to one of Ghoul's stories or – 

“Wait,” he says. “Who's the other non-executive guest?”

“That would be the zonerunner. Codenamed – ”

No. _No._

“Fun Ghoul,” Gerard says.

“Would you still like to decline the invitation?”

He hesitates. This is his his last chance to look away. He can Let Leith kill his show. He can never go back to the rehab center. He can never have to look Ghoul in the eyes about it.

“No,” he says. “No. Put me down.”

The droid nods. “I'll activate your curfew exemption momentarily.” Then she stares at Gerard closely. He's suddenly aware that he's on a _video line_ with a raised voice, nearly crying – it must be so dead obvious he's off the pills. For all he knows someone at city surveillance is watching. Maybe he'll hear an exterminator's knock on his own door.

“You should be careful, Mr. Way,” she says. “It could be dangerous tonight.”

“With the terrorists – you mean.”

She lifts her eyebrows slightly. “Of course.”

He cuts the call while he can still keep his eyes dry.

Gerard stays away from the cabinet mirror as he dresses. He's got uniforms for these events already, and assembling one calms him: crisp cream shirt, broadly cut black jacket, thin tie from the latest runway season. He sorts through his closet twice before remembering he left his after-sunset coat with Ghoul. He picks up his last-season jacket reluctantly, ignoring the last of the sickly smell from the elevator. Well, showrunners are allowed to be a little sloppy.

He can handle this, he promises as he opens his apartment door. Don't wall away the guilt and fear, all the weaknesses that the pills are supposed to save him from. Use them. Understand them. Be something the city can't anticipate.

Gerard stops and turns back from the door. He crosses the room to his desk and pulls out his photograph. From its back, the zonerunner's blank face stares back at him.

“Okay,” he whispers, folding it into his pocket. “Let's fucking do this. You and me.”

The streets are lit by grayscale billboards and the glowing sensors of the cleandroids. Camera-eyes stare down from the street corners, and Gerard looks up into them, letting the system read his face and find his exemption. He's never walked so far after curfew, or maybe he's just never noticed how desolate the city can be, how dark the looming skin of the sky-membrane.

Leith's tower lights beckon. The feed elevator slides slowly up its side, shuddering at each slug tube like the building itself is in pain. That's what's under the veneer of Battery City, beneath its exterminators' masks and the droids' false smiles and the executives' beautiful grins and the wholesome BL/TV shows on every screen. His life is built on other people's pain. Maybe it always has been.

Gerard slides his hands into his pockets and looks at one of the billboards' flickering clocks. The party's almost started. He'll be fashionably on time.

()()()

Ghoul fights the injection, but he's too faint with hurt and hunger and spent adrenalin, and his right hand can barely close to throw a punch. Korse is gone when he wakes up – a 'crow is opening the back door of a van and grabbing the chain around his neck, pulling him onto the pavement. He's got just enough time to register fresh air and the fact that Gerard's coat is gone before she drags him through a mirrored glass door. Fuck. He never wants to see the inside of an elevator again.

The box glides up the building and Ghoul looks out its glass wall. He barely remembers what was here before BL/ind knocked it down, but he remembers the place as _alive._ Now, at night... the city is embalmed. No clutches of kids ducking their curfews, no tipsy couples on the corner trying to hail a cab. It looks nearly as empty as it did just before the bombs.

What a fucking convenient _coincidence_ that had been – that BL/ind's offer expired the day the rest of the city died.

He's told himself a million times: Batt City would have been worse than death. They'd have tested their pills on him until he couldn't remember shit, convinced his mom to take them along with the rest of the citizens. He'd have watched them dissolve everything that made her special, said _I love you_ out of habit until they both forgot what the words meant. People in Batt City don't feel. And they don't care.

Except... he remembers Gerard draping the jacket around his shoulders and trying in some awkward, stilted way to make Ghoul feel better. It wasn't much, just a flicker. But it was more than he expected from any of them.

The elevator stops and the door opens and the 'crow pushes him out. He nearly stumbles into the porcelain arms of a droid.

“You must be Mr. Ghoul,” she says smoothly. He almost laughs, but he's too disoriented at the buzz of a crowd down the strangely iridescent hall. “Will you come with me?”

“Don't exactly have a fucking choice.”

The elevator retreats with the 'crow, and the droid pauses. Her eyes run down Ghoul's body, catching at the cut across his chest.

“No. You don't,” she says softly. “Chief Executive Televisor Leith will see you now. It will go easier if you don't fight him.”

She flashes a bright smile and beckons him to follow.

“Wait. What the fuck is a televisor? Why am I here? Why are you doing this – ”

The droid opens the door. A party – they've brought him to a fucking _party_.

No kind he's seen before, of course, not his wild, honest nights in the Zones. Just bunches of men and women in black and white, sipping from those skinny little glasses people use in old movies. They all stand the same way: square and tall and imposing, like they're competing to see who can take up the most space without getting called on it. And the ones who aren't talking have their gaze focused on the walls – covered in screens, grainy footage of an open road.

Wait – he knows that place. The route at the edge of Zone 1, just outside the Lobby.

“What's – ”

But the droid is gone, and in her place stands a wall of a man. His white suit matches his perfect teeth, and his tanned face has the sheen of plastic. He looks like he was grown in a vat, gold watch and all.

He sets his drink on a side table and stretches a hand. Ghoul wonders warily if he's supposed to shake it. Instead the man grabs grabs the chain around Ghoul's neck and pulls him forward. Without warning he prods the bruises on Ghoul's ribs. Ghoul flinches in pain. The man laughs.

“They did a number on you, didn't they?”

_Fuck you_ , Ghoul starts to say, but it catches in his throat. This man – the chief executive televisor, it has to be – doesn't have the dull eyes of a Batt City citizen or even Korse's cold hate. He looks at Ghoul with vacuous, unblinking curiosity.

“I watched the tape. So I know all about it. But let me get _you_ up to speed.”

Leith yanks Ghoul so close he can smell the man's bitter chemical cologne. He closes a thick hand in Ghoul's hair and twists him to face the screens.

“We've got a tracker on a car you might be familiar with. It's heading straight toward the city.”

Ghoul's heart pounds. They couldn't have been so stupid. Not just to come after him, but to use the main road. Maybe he gives his fear away, because Leith laughs again and slides his arm around Ghoul's shoulders.

“Change to groundroid view, side of highway,” he mutters. The screens blink. “They should be within range of the cameras soon.”

_Breathe,_ Ghoul tells himself. Fucking breathe. He can't look weak in front of Leith.

“Any second now...”

Something comes into view – but not the Trans Am.

Witch. It's Cherri's bike.

Leith frowns, and Ghoul almost cries with relief.

“Send dracs. Clear the extraneous vehicle. Give us a show.” Leith looks out across the black-and-white crowd. “You should feel special. We've got at least five high-level executives here. A couple divisions worth of VPs. It's the best crowd this season.”

Cherri swerves as Leith swaps feeds. Ghoul thinks he pulls his gun, but with the grainy feed it's hard to be sure – until one of the dracs wipes out, nearly taking the camera with it.

This must be some kind of diversion – no other reason for Cherri to get so close to the city. Which might mean they're still coming. Ghoul pushes down a fragment of hope. Even if they get into the city, they've got no chance of finding him. Even if they knew where to look, they'd never get through this fucking tower's security.

“Do you know this one? On the motorcycle?”

Ghoul shakes his head.

“Really? There can't be that many of you after the war.”

Ghoul's heart quickens again, but this time with rage. Leith tightens his grip.

“Switch feeds again. More dracs,” he says. He turns back to Ghoul. “Maybe you know a few of them? Not that you could tell – ”

Cherri's bike slams to a halt. He moves strangely, like he's dropping something on the highway. Then he turns and hits the throttle, jets right out of the camera's range – just in time for the road to go up in a blast. Two bikes skid right into the rubble. Look at that. Flying dracs.

Ghoul glances over, hoping he can see Leith's horrible perfect face fall. The man only nods pensively. “Interesting,” he says. “Well, the tracker's gone dark. Maybe they didn't care that much about you after all. Let's go make the rounds before I call it.”

Ghoul stumbles as Leith pulls him toward the crowd. He barely registers their faces, too busy working through scenarios in his head. There's other roads into the Lobby, he thinks as Leith claps another tanned man on the back. But the city's got to have cameras – he flinches as a willowy woman slides her hand down his chest to trace the gash on his hip. If Jet and Kobra show their faces in here, they'll get picked up before they're even close – Witch, everyone here wants to _touch_ him, press at the staples, the bruises, always with some... some apathetic half-curiosity, like a kid poking a spider with a stick – 

“Oh. Finally. Somebody you _do_ know.”

Leith guides him toward a corner. And Ghoul can swear his heart stops.

It's Gerard.

He's dressed like one of them now, boxy black suit and tie and tamed hair that shines in the screens' sodium glow. Gerard looks up as they approach, and his gaze flicks over Ghoul indifferently. He turns to Leith instead.

“It's a nice setup, isn't it?” says Leith.

Gerard grins – fuck, Ghoul's _never_ made him do that, has he? No – no reason to, and Ghoul doesn't care anyway...

“You never gave me that greenlight, you know,” Gerard says.

“My droid never granted permissions? I'll have to... correct it for that.” He raises his eyebrows as if at a private joke, and Gerard _gets_ it – or at least he smiles back. “We'll prioritize your show. I'm expecting great ratings after tonight – very big, the Zones, right now, for executives. Very big.”

“Do you have another lead on the zonerunners?”

Leith's smile looks forced – but only a little. “I think it's actually more aesthetic if they never show,” he says. “It maintains the frisson of unmet expectations.”

“Of course.”

“I do like this one, though.” He yanks Ghoul's head up again. “I wonder if we could do something with him. He's TV pretty. Right?”

Gerard looks at Ghoul, and there's nothing human behind his eyes. Just the same dull interest as everyone else at the party. Of course. Gerard is from the city. Those flickers of kindness in the freezers were just a trick to get Ghoul talking. Or maybe they never happened at all. Maybe Ghoul's more delusional than he thought. He hasn't even got Gerard's coat to prove he was there – only cuts and bruises and burns and a chain around his neck, like he's a fucking _animal._

Before Gerard can say anything, Leith flicks his sleeve to check a screen on his wrist. He looks back up, and his smile is unsettlingly genuine.

“ _Interesting._ Synergy Plaza, Tower Prime, Floor One, Camera Three. And send the exterminators,” he says. The screens flicker. This time, there's no reprieve.

Under the security camera, Jet and Kobra cross the hallway with their rayguns drawn. Kobra looks straight up into the camera from behind his sunglasses, and when he raises his pistol the screen goes blank – but it's too late. Leith's muttered another feed name, and it picks them up from a different angle. No escaping the view in Batt City.

A droid approaches with a platter of those skinny glasses. Leith drains one and takes another. Gerard picks up a glass gingerly. And Ghoul watches the first exterminators in their white suits and black vests approach. Kobra takes down the first one. Ghoul gets a pang of guilt at that, wonders if he still knows anybody in the force. Leith zooms the camera on Kobra's face – but Ghoul just sees the same grim focus he's always got in firefights.

The executives have gone quiet. They fan across the room, fixing to the closest screen like a wavehead staring up at the sun.

Leith murmurs, almost reverently: “Audio.”

The room vibrates with the pulse of laser shots and exterminators' boots. The pale alcohol in Gerard's glass shudders, still untouched. He glances over at Ghoul, but Ghoul avoids the look – fuck if he's going to let any of these people see his fear.

“Stairwell Two, Camera One.”

Jet busts the door to the stairs and Kobra follows, pausing for the trick pistol spin that tells Ghoul he's checking the power meter. Only so many spare batteries you can fit in a jacket. And too many exterminators for all of them, even with Kobra's aim.

“ _Interesting_ ,” Leith says again. “They do seem to know where he was held. If they know how to get there, they've got about...” he checks his watch. “Thirty floors left. We can send some aerial cameras to the tower bridge.”

Gerard nods, gives an easy smile. His fingers don't match it, Ghoul notices – they're sharp-knuckled, clenched around the glass. But before he can wonder what that means, Leith runs his fingers down Ghoul's spine.

“Now. Could I get your advice about something?”

It takes a moment for Ghoul to realize Leith is talking to him.

“I assume you don't know the tower bridge. But it's where your friends are almost certainly going, and it's essentially impassible. We've got a full squad of exterminators blocking it off, and another headed up the stairs behind them. Two walls of guns closing in. I think it's a good place for a last stand.” His grip on Ghoul's neck tightens. “That said, I could be persuaded otherwise. I could call off the men in the stairwell, drive your people back to whatever godforsaken hole they crawled out of. Bad climax, maybe. Decent sequel hook.”

Ghoul wants nothing more than to squeeze his eyes shut. Stupid, childish wish. He just... he can't do this anymore. Give him a blaster shot from a 'crow. A car crash. Fatal fucking botulism from a can of dogmeat. Not this room of perfect, smiling _things_.

“So. What exactly would you do for that?” Leith asks.

He stares at the floor, at nothing, because it's the only way he's going to keep his voice from cracking as he whispers:

“Anything you want.”

Leith spreads his hand around Ghoul's neck.

“Automatic tracking loop,” he tells the room.

And Gerard... Gerard just fucking watches as they leave.

Ghoul barely registers where they're going. He can't tell if anyone was ever supposed to live here. None of the furniture looks like furniture. A door shuts behind him, and the gray room has all the personality of his prison cell. Then Leith shoves him against the wall and pins his wrists above his head. He can't help a sharp cry at the pain in his ribs, but Leith only presses himself closer. Ghoul feels teeth on his ear, a hot hand in his hair. He remembers the droid's advice. _Easier if you don't fight him._

The worst part is that he _can't_ fight, not if there's even a chance Leith will keep his word. Whatever happens to him here – at least he probably won't have much longer to remember it.

Leith draws back and slides his hand to Ghoul's shoulder, pushes him to his knees. Cool tears are blurring his vision, and he doesn't bother trying to stop crying, because it's not _more_ humiliating than letting Leith lift his face and slide a thumb across his lips, than not fucking biting it off as Leith slips it into his mouth, runs it along his teeth and reaches his other hand toward the zip on his pants...

“Hm.” Leith drops Ghoul's head and stops. “No. I don't think I like you like this.”

Ghoul tries to stop his hands from trembling.

“Like what?” he whispers.

“Willing.”

Leith grabs the chain suddenly and yanks Ghoul to his feet. He slams his face to the wall and Ghoul sags, dizzy, staples digging into his skin. But Leith crushes him against its grit.

“Let me tell you the truth. Nothing you do here matters,” Leith hisses, his teeth nicking Ghoul's ear. “I'm going to fuck you until you scream. Then I'm going to make you watch those _cockroaches_ you whored yourself out for die.”

Ghoul tenses himself to do _anything_ – to kick Leith, to swear at him, to call for help from a room of people who are _biochemically incapable_ of providing it. But he's got nothing left.

“ _Please_ ,” he says – he fucking _whimpers_. “Please don't do this.”

Leith grabs Ghoul's hip, forces his fingers under his jeans. Ghoul closes his eyes, waits for more pain – 

A burst of raygun fire echoes against the walls. And Leith goes limp.

The dead weight brings Ghoul to the floor. He tries to scrabble free and stumbles and looks up, somehow expecting Jet or Kobra. But it's Gerard – shaking hands clenching the grip of a drac's white raygun, black eyes wide with shock.

“I'm – I'm – I'm so fucking sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leith might be the single most loathsome character I've ever written, and seriously, that is a high fucking bar.


	9. The Spine Of The System

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: This ain't a party. Get off the dancefloor.
> 
> C-Side: You want the get down? Here comes the gang war.

> _Synthetic humanoids are eligible for demi-citizen status in Battery City. Demi-citizenship includes limited protection from deactivation without due process, transfer of any deactivated remains to a designated “next of kin” before mandatory recycling, and access to Better Living fashion lookbooks. Please visit a local customer service facility for an application._

No. He shot Leith. Did he shoot Ghoul? Did he shoot _both_? This is not the plan. 

Not that the plan was great to begin with. All hinging on the stupid idea that Gerard could find Ghoul alone and pass him a gun and set him free in the city without getting anything on his own hands. And now it's gone to hell because he forgot that an executive – that the sadistic madman he's worked under for _years_ – wouldn't have planned something even worse than killing Ghoul's crew in front of him.

Now he's not even sure which one of them that apology was for.

Leith is facedown on the floor, and his back is cratered with burns – singed, smoking holes in the pure white of his suit. Ghoul is still tangled in his limbs, blood seeping from around the staples on his cuts. But he's moving. He twists halfway out from under Leith and kicks at the body savagely, breathing shaky, sobbing gasps.

Gerard watches, frozen. He expects someone to burst through the door any moment. But there's no reason for them to, he thinks. The party down the hall is still going, and the sound from its speakers is still on, blaring the crash of doors and peal of lasers. And although the whole party is Leith's doing, Gerard doubts a single guest is thinking about him. They're dropping references to new home goods purchases and production statistics, trying to impress other executives when they spin into their orbits, ignoring them as soon as they drift past. Nothing is real to an executive except the self and the company. It's what makes them so effective.

Until one of them needs help.

Ghoul is free. But he's still on his knees over the body – driving his cuffed fists into dead meat, tears dripping from his face. With a wary look at the door, Gerard slides the gun back into his blazer's inside pocket, where it sits heavily against his ribs.

“Hey,” he says quietly, reaching his arm across Leith. “Hey. Come on. We need to leave.”

“Will you just – will you just stop _fucking_ with me!” Gerard flinches at Ghoul's furious hiss. “Pretending like you're a _person_ , pretending like you're _nice_. Just – just shoot me or _fuck_ me or whatever you're going to do to me, just be fucking honest about it like the rest of them – ”

He keeps his hand outstretched. “Please. I don't know what you think I'm doing,” he says. “But I've never shot a gun before. I just murdered my boss. I feel like my brain has holes in it. I've got a plan to get you out of here. And Ghoul, I am _sort of freaking the fuck out._ ”

Ghoul looks up.

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm off my pills, I didn't even want to be here, I have no idea what I'm doing – ”

“About getting out.”

Gerard takes a deep breath. He tries to regain that blank, sharp headspace he's spent the last half-hour in. “There's a second elevator in the tower. It's automatic, stops at every floor to feed silicate into construction slugs. I timed out the intervals. It should be...” He looks at his watch. “It's fourteen minutes away.”

“And how the fuck am I supposed to get there? Maybe you didn't notice, but I'm pretty fucking useless.”

“All you have to do is trust me.”

If Ghoul won't come with him, the last piece of the plan is done for. All he'll have is a stolen gun and a dead executive. He keeps his hand out as Ghoul wipes tears from his face. Then, finally, Ghoul stands. Right. He could probably do that on his own. Gerard puts his arm down.

“Fine. I trust you. As far as the edge of this building.”

“I'm... I'm going to have to touch you.”

He waits for Ghoul to insult him or swear at him again. Instead he just sets his shoulders and nods.

That was the easy part. And Gerard barely managed it.

Ghoul steps over the body and stares at the door. Gerard closes his hand around the back of his neck, trying to imitate Leith's casual proprietor's smirk. He glances at his watch. Thirteen minutes.

The audio hits again as they step outside. The zonerunners are still in a stairwell, their steps slower and heavier-looking. One of them takes down another exterminator, but the executives ignore it – they're back at their hors d'oeuvres and champagne and conversation clusters. Gerard tries to remember the directions he'd worked out. The feed elevator's on the far side of the building, and the only route he's sure of is straight through the crowd.

It won't be hard, he tells himself. The last time he was at a party with executives, he couldn't even make one look at him. The surgical lesions don't touch their memories, so they all know each other – probably know each others' exact titles – on sight. They don't know him, and so he doesn't matter.

Then again, last time he was at a party, he didn't have Ghoul.

The first exec turns when they're a few meters in. He grabs Ghoul's shoulder, and Gerard thinks frantically that they've been found out – almost goes for the raygun in his blazer. But the man only examines Ghoul with reptilian interest.

“This is the zonerunner?”

Ghoul is trembling under his hand. Gerard tries to smirk _harder_.

“What, him? No. He's the new VP of acquisitions.”

He's made a terrible mistake, he thinks. But the man only laughs, on a kind of delay – like his brain has worked its way through to identifying a joke, and whatever's left of his soul wants to find it amusing. Gerard knows that feeling.

The camera's swapped to an upper-floor hallway with a squad of exterminators, and for once Gerard is relieved that Michael is safe in his veteran's home. He wonders if the rest of them feel fear.

Halfway across the room.

Ghoul is still shaking. Gerard risks a peripheral glance and sees a liquid glassiness on his eyes. Then he has to look away before he remembers opening the door to Leith's back room, hearing Ghoul beg – No. For eleven more minutes, he cannot care if anybody hurts the first person he's touched – not shaken hands with out of duty, really _touched_ – in years.

Funny, he realizes: with a few changes they'd be in a scene from Romance TV. One of those settings the computer would call “high-school prom” or “debutante cotillion.” The deuteragonist couple opens the door and all heads turn. They'd have to be wearing the season's latest fashion line, sure, and the genders don't work – logically Ghoul is short and long-haired and therefore female, although Gerard gets a strange pang of something like _envy_ from that – 

Okay. He's losing focus.

But he likes the idea. Of people looking at Ghoul because he's clever and gorgeous and strange. Of people looking at Gerard because he's with someone like that.

Another executive stops them – a woman in black satin. She puts a hand on Ghoul's chest and picks casually at one of his staples, watches his face as he flinches in pain and the tears threaten to spill past his eyelashes. That's fine. Ten more minutes – 

Before he can think better of it, Gerard grabs her hand. “Stop that,” he says – _purrs_ , is what they call it in scripts. “You're making me jealous.”

The woman pauses and fixes her diamond-hard gaze on him. “I don't know you.” She sounds slightly unsure.

“But wouldn't you like to?”

His smirk has become physically painful. But he meets her eyes and holds them. Because underneath the pills and the pain, what holds Battery City together is a silent agreement: _we know how people should be._ And right now, he is not being Gerard Way, Better Living Television employee, Tier +1. In fact, he's not sure who he is.

The executive opens her mouth – but whatever she says is swallowed in a sudden hail of laser fire.

The screens have cycled onto an aerial camera of the towers. It captures the bridge between them in perfect panorama, and Gerard can pick out a cluster of exterminators at the right side, firing the controlled bursts of their rifles. He looks to the other side, scanning for what must be two lifeless bodies, dreading Ghoul's response. Instead, one of the exterminators goes down. And then another.

The camera pans. The door from Tower Prime is off its hinges, and the zonerunners are crouched behind it. One of them slams a battery into his raygun and whips his head up, taking down a third. Tall, light-haired, dark glasses, almost familiar-looking – the way truly telegenic people are, Gerard supposes, although...

It doesn't matter. The executives are watching the walls now. Gerard drops Ghoul's neck, grabs his hand, and pulls him through the service door. Then he turns the corner and freezes.

“Mr. Way,” the droid says, giving her bland, false smile. “I'm sorry. Are you lost?”

“No. I'm...” All the composure from the other room is gone. All the guilt is back. “I mean, Ms...” He doesn't even know her name. If she has a name. “Is anybody watching us?”

“Mr. Leith has surveillance privilege over the –”

“Leith is dead.”

The droid looks at him and then over at Ghoul. “Mr. Way, if you're joking, I've been told my humor is underdeveloped –”

“He's not joking,” Ghoul mutters. “Bastard's fucking dusted.”

“You mean you –”

“Look, you don't owe me anything.” Gerard looks at his watch. Seven minutes. “But he's down the hall at the other side of the ballroom. Third door to the right. If you keep the party going, stop anyone from looking for him... ”

The droid's hollow smile drops. “I can't get you down the elevator.”

“We're not taking the elevator. Not the one you're thinking of.”

Gerard gestures past her to the construction spine, and the droid nods tightly. “Then I can buy time. The whole night if I'm lucky,” she says. “Would you like anything before you leave?”

He looks at Ghoul's bare skin.

“We've got six minutes. That enough time to get my coat?”

The spine hums with electricity as they approach. Gerard works the emergency door open and stares into the blackness of a forty-story drop.

Ghoul grips the frame. “I know I said _edge of this building_ ,” he says. “Didn't think you were gonna ask me to fucking jump off it.”

“It's coming. Three minutes.”

The droid returns with his coat, and Gerard wraps it around Ghoul's shoulders, telling himself that he really, truly hears something coming up the spine.

“What's on the camera feed?” he asks her.

“They've crossed the bridge into the rehabilitation center. Exterminators have the plaza surrounded.”

“But they're still alive.”

He's not imagining it. The elevator is clattering below them – almost there. He takes a last look at the droid.

“I'm sorry,” he tells her. “I know it doesn't do anything, that I didn't do anything. But I – ”

“You've done something.” She gives him a hint of a smile – the first he's ever seen that might pass as real. “I'm not sure what, just yet. But if he's dead... then definitely... _something_.”

He looks down at the elevator. “You ready?” he asks Ghoul.

“Doesn't matter.”

“Of course it – ” And then Ghoul drops through the hatch and Gerard follows, falling into the night.

()()()

Jet throws his last batteries to Kobra as they reach the panopticon. He drags a dusted exterminator to the security room door and slaps a stiff hand to the security pad, and _fuck_ how long's it been since he had to kill somebody, a real person, family and thoughts and a _soul_ and goddamn everything.

Kobra stares down his pistol's sights and Jet thinks for about the millionth time how fucking dead he'd be without him right now, and how close he came to ghosting him on sight back when Ghoul dragged a fucking exterminator to their camp and asked for bandages. Just a few months into the war, still high on purpose and glory and stupid loyalty. What a joke.

Jet grew up wanting two things: to be a spaceman, and to be an American. After the fires he learned to shut up about them, even told himself it was better – no more lying to friends about why he couldn't get a driver's license, no more fear of getting deported to some place he couldn't even remember. Then the recruitment broadcasts started: _Take back the country. Take back the Zones._

The only sales pitch Ghoul needed was his hate – for Better Living, for Batt City, for himself. When they drove out to a Zone 7 bar, met up with a woman in a gold tooth and fringe jacket, she'd taken one look at the red-white-and-blue patch on Jet's leather jacket and hooked him with love.

The fragments of the old government – bombed three-quarters to oblivion – didn't start the Analog Wars. Batt City had been closing in on the Zones for months, stamping out the last settlements its citizens could escape to. But some three-letter agency had seen an opportunity. They'd backed the killjoys up with crates of rayguns and rockets, promised to help rebuild once BL/ind fell. For Jet that'd been good enough.

America was still alive, and he belonged to it now. When Ghoul's hate had run out Jet had carried him with that love. When Kobra's leg healed Jet had won him over with it. When BL/ind vaporized Zone 7 and half his squad had called the war a loss and saved what they could, Jet had convinced the rest there was hope. He'd led them all the way to that last night at the edge of the city, following the radio's call.

The government had rallied its last bombers for a drop on Battery City, gotten the fuel and missiles to take out BL/ind's generators. It asked the killjoys for an opening and they delivered – spending their blood and power jamming radar stations, holding the airstrip that could have let BL/ind get its own planedroids off the ground. Jet had crouched behind a blasted-out air traffic terminal for hours, waiting and waiting to see those pilots light up the night.

The sun only rose on a massacre. Dumb luck separated the survivors from the corpses and the dracs, first on the battlegrounds and then rippling through the Zones, exterminators slaughtering anyone they found.

Newsie had broadcast the last blow from a desert foxhole with a PTTP. She'd intercepted their agency handlers celebrating a new treaty: a tax deal with Better Living Industries. Because behind those big promises about freedom and rebuilding, all they wanted was some extra leverage on Batt City. When they got what they needed, they left the Zones to rot.

And now Jet's lost Ghoul and led Kobra into another deathtrap, and he's still wearing that fucking flag and spaceman's helmet. You'd think sometime he'd fucking learn.

He yells for Kobra to fall back and hits the emergency lock once they're both inside. The exterminators can override it, but the closest living one's still crossing the bridge, and by the time he gets here Jet'll have the whole room good and scrambled.

“Hurry up,” Kobra mutters.

“Sure, man.” Jet pulls the safety panel and snips the lockpad wire, runs his fingers along the terminal's network cable and clips the splitter on. “Good advice. Real novel.”

Jet pushes up his sunglasses and studies the splitter's little dot-matrix display. Years past the war, and BL/ind's still using the same low-rent encryption.

“How long can you keep them out?” Kobra asks.

“Few hours, give or take.”

“How long to get the elevator working?”

“Few hours,” Jet says. “Give or take.”

He tosses his drained gun on the terminal and looks around the room. The panopticon is a great glass eye looking down across the rehabilitation center – Kobra says it's mirrored on the outside, but from within it's like standing in thin air. The elevator runs down a pillar in the center. Until the splitter gets them core security access, it's useless. A 'crow's simple command from the freezers would stop it in its tracks. Jet's not even sure he can get it working at all.

But they're so close to Ghoul if he's still alive.

In wartime the exterminators would've shot a killjoy as soon as they caught one, or put a drac mask on them. But that was when the city was scared. Now Jet suspects Kobra's right: this is all some kind of game. They're thorns in BL/ind's fingers, stealing a few crates of meds, wasting a few dracs. BL/ind's making an example by plucking them out. And it's gonna do it slow and vicious – the way only a corporation can.

“How much juice you got?” Jet asks.

“Enough for another firefight. Assuming no waste.”

“With you? Never.”

Kobra laughs. Great. If he's showing emotions already, he thinks the mission's over and they're about to die.

So maybe Jet was stupid to start another fight they got no chance to win. But they're in the middle of it now. And this time he knows nobody's gonna sweep in and back them up. If they want to leave here with Ghoul, they've gotta do it all themselves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TBH this fic should have four more chapters of Gerard giving Fun Ghoul a series of increasingly unfashionable jackets.
> 
> "The killjoys were emo teen Contras (with 99.9% fewer war crimes)" is probably not remotely anything MCR intended. But _Danger Days_ seems very '70s/'80s to me, so a cynical neo-Reagan-Doctrine feels true to the spirit of the thing. And last time I [wrote a war](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9353420/chapters/21185513) it was a ludicrously bloody post-apocalyptic patent infringement dispute. So it's not the _least_ plausible thing I've come up with.


	10. The Casualty Ward

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Sometimes you call up somebody you love and don't realize you've been talking to a ghost.
> 
> B-Side: Your best friend's eyes are not on the fucking table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you really, really hate the general and non-explicit suggestion of eye trauma to non-humans then this is gonna be a tough chapter.

> _Better Living Industries reminds citizens to avoid solicitation of any emotionally charged recollections and all humorous anecdotes predating the current shopping season. Remember: Questions are a burden to others, and answers a prison for oneself._

The elevator grinds to a stop at the bottom of the tower. Gerard rolls out of it and shakes the dust from his hair, gives up on cleaning his newly whitened suit. The street outside is empty. Nobody's seen them, and if he's lucky, his curfew permit's still active.

“Pull up your hood,” he tells Ghoul. “And stay close to me.”

Ghoul leaves off whispering a litany of curses. “Where're we going?”

Gerard tries to inject some confidence into his voice – pretend he didn't just come up with this plan on the way down the building. “We're going to see my brother. Michael.”

“Why?”

 _Right. Excellent question._ “Um... he's been in the Zones. And if anybody's going to help us in this city, it's him.”

Never mind that it's past curfew, almost midnight, when any normal citizen would be asleep. And Gerard barely remembers the way to the Victory Pavilion. And he doesn't know how Michael's going to get there.

Ghoul shakes his head in the near-dark. “I don't have time for that. Just tell me how to get to the... to wherever my crew is.”

“What exactly are you going to do when you find them?”

“I'll figure it out.”

The resignation in his voice says what his words don't. Ghoul is going to get to the rehabilitation center, and he's going to die – as close to his friends as he can manage.

“Please. Ghoul. Come with me. Just as far as Michael. If he can't help us... I'll take you to the plaza myself.”

Ghoul looks at the ground. Finally he wipes a patch of dust from his face and pulls the jacket's hood to cover it.

“All right.”

The streetlights cast patches of cold white against the cement. Gerard keeps away from cameras when he can and looks square at them when he can't, makes sure they get a good, ID-confirming look that sets their threat levels low, so they won't notice the faceless figure huddled beside him. The pavilion isn't far – jammed between a children's crèche and a low-slung shopping mall. Its decorative monument rises above both, wire-slim lights beaming meaningless hieroglyphics into the night.

Gerard attended the unveiling for his last job in the propaganda division: interviewing veteran exterminators about their favorite battles in the Zones. He remembers hearing the symptoms from a viral grenade or the spotting procedure for a sniper stakeout and nodding politely, vaguely and abstractly _interested_. Not vividly recalling the thud of a body and the bittersweetness of burned linen and scorched flesh...

He raises a hand to stop Ghoul and leans against the wall of a pill boutique, closing his eyes and willing himself not to gag.

“What is it?” Ghoul asks.

“Nothing. I just... I've never killed someone before.” He presses his forehead against the cool glass. “And I know he deserved it, and I know you can do it without even thinking, I just can't stop remembering – ”

“What do you mean – without even thinking?”

“You killed two guys right in front of me. Didn't blink.”

“I... fuck. In the freezers.” Ghoul pulls his jacket tighter. “Those weren't _guys_. They were dracs.”

“Whatever. I'm sure they were bad people but so was Leith –”

“No. Leith could think. And talk. And... and _want_ shit,” he says. “Dracs're as far from alive as you can get and still be breathing. They got no thoughts except BL/ind's orders, no memories, no feelings...”

“How do you know – ”

“Because they're _us_!” Ghoul stops, lowers his voice. “BL/ind made them during the war after it started losing exterminators. Capture a fighter – or shit, just a Zone survivor. Wipe their fucking mind blank. Pull a mask over their head and send them back into the field. We used to try to capture them. But it just made it worse. Take off the mask and you've got something that used to be your squadmate or your fucking friend, and all they'll do is growl or _laugh_ at you, this horrible fucking _chitter_...”

He trails off and waits for Gerard to steady himself.

“We're almost there,” Gerard says. “Let's go.”

Ghoul must be confused about at least one thing: BL/ind never lost an exterminator in the war. Gerard put that at the bottom of every daily newsreel, big black letters. BATTERY CITY CASUALTIES: 0. He got the number straight from the exterminator dispatches.

The Victory Pavilion's glass hexes shine beneath the streetlights. Gerard flinches at sudden motion, but it's just a cleandroid, buffing out the footprints of pedestrians who probably don't even look up at the monument. Gerard's never seen it at night – it's like some kind of weapon, threatening to pierce the membrane of the sky.

“Where's your brother?”

“I... I'll have to call him, I guess.”

The security cameras were bad enough, but that's going to be outright dangerous. He approaches the monument as if he's going to see Michael at the far side, but all he finds is a service door.

“Can you, I don't know, pick the lock on that?” he asks Ghoul.

“I don't even see a lock. All the shit here's electronic.”

Gerard pushes at the door. Maybe he can call from inside and they can hide there if it tips off security – although then that still leaves Michael walking straight into a trap and – 

The door clicks open.

Something whirs above him, and Gerard looks up to see a camera. The door slowly recedes into the cement wall of the tower, and a light glows into existence.

“What the fuck is happening?” asks Ghoul.

Gerard shrugs. “Hopefully? Luck.”

There's supposed to be nothing inside the monument as far as he knows – maybe some maintenance conduits or equipment. When he steps through the door, he sees a bare, dusty chamber with a single staircase in the center. And he hears a murmur of voices above.

“Fuck,” Ghoul whispers. “Get out.”

It's the most sensible thing Ghoul's ever said, but Gerard ignores him. There has to be a reason Michael suggested _here_ of all places. Why the door opened for them. He takes a step up the stairwell. The voices fade to one: Michael, distant – maybe a few floors away.

“Gerard. You made it.”

The lights are out above him. Gerard scrambles up the stairs through the darkness.

“Michael – what is this place?”

“It's complicated. Come on up and I'll explain. Your friend can come too.”

Ghoul says something sharp and sudden below him. It can wait. How long since he's seen Michael's face in person? How long since they saw each other without the safe padding of the pills?

“We're in bad trouble. I don't want to drag you into it,” Gerard says.

“Don't worry about me. I'll be fine.”

“I – I do nothing _but_ worry about you.” He's still groping in the dark, but Michael's voice is closer. “You never came to see me. I never knew if you wanted to.”

“I'm sorry. But it's going to make sense very soon.”

Soft light fades in above him. He takes the last stairs at a run and coughs at the dust on their gunmetal railing – and then he can't breathe at all.

The room is round and windowless, its walls an institutional white he recognizes from every call with Michael. He cannot touch the walls – they are separated from him by glass paneling, and the space beyond is as gleamingly clean as the stairwell is grimy. On every panel, just above his head, a camera points against the wall. In the center of every camera's aim is a body, legless and impassive, arms resting against the sides of a familiar institutional chair. And beneath every body runs a cable threading across the floor to a bank of dull black electronics.

Gerard approaches one of them – a man around his age, blond and stout. Up close, the skin is a little too smooth and something about the hair falls slightly wrong. Not the kind of thing that might come through a grainy video feed. But enough for him to understand: they aren't bodies. They're droids.

“I understand this must – ”

“ – be – ”

“ – very confusing.”

The first voice is Michael's, just behind Gerard. The others... he's never heard them in his life.

“It's... yeah. It's _very confusing_.” He closes his eyes, dreading what he's about to do. “That's definitely the phrase I'd use.”

He turns.

Michael – half of Michael, inhuman Michael, the Michael he's been talking to _since the war_ – lifts a hand in greeting and smiles. But it's the woman beside him who speaks.

“Hey there,” she says – lilting near-falsetto.

The blond man behind him.

“Nice to – ”

A brunet with unkempt eyebrows.

“ – meet you – ”

And back to Michael again.

“ – in person.”

As if nothing has happened.

“What the hell are you?” Gerard says.

“I'll wait for your – ”

“ – friend – ”

“ – before I explain.”

He hears footsteps on the stairs below – Ghoul.

“No,” Gerard says. “No, we're getting out of here, we'll find some other way – ”

Ghoul rests against the railing, breathing fast and frantic.

“Door's fucking locked,” he says. “Something fucking _locked the door_.”

“Just hear me – ”

“ – out.”

“I'm not trying to – ”

“ – alarm – ”

“ – you.”

“Really?” Gerard laughs. It sounds hysterical in his own ears. “You don't think this is the creepiest way you could possibly have introduced yourself?”

Michael cracks a wry smile. “I'm sorry,” he – _it_ – says. “I never get to pick my voice. If _you_ could choose from a thousand different pencils every time you drew a picture... would you really use just one?”

“I don't know what I'd do. Because – in case this wasn't crystal clear already – I have _no idea what you are_.”

“Better Living Industries designated me the Casualty Ward.”

“What does that mean?”

“Technically: I am one thousand thirty-two personality profiles anchored to a shared industrial intelligence core. Culturally: I am one thousand thirty-two veterans of the Helium Wars, all –”

“ – confidentially –”

“ – deceased. Proximately: I am Michael Way, serial number 02946, field exterminator second-class.”

“Deceased,” Gerard repeats.

He must be misunderstanding something. His brother has a life in the city – not one Gerard has ever seen, but there must be people who care for him...

“Biologically: killed in –”

“ – action.”

“But philosophically –”

“I have access to surveillance footage and personality assessment surveys. In a sense, I _am_ Michael Way – ”

“You are fucking _not_.” Gerard's voice cracks. He slams a fist against the plexiglass – it does nothing but leave a smear of dust against the panel, and the bodies around him ignore it. “You're a fucking trick. You're nothing. And I didn't – didn't see it.”

“Better Living has received no citizen complaints about the program. In three years...” Not-Michael shrugs. “You're the first to meet me.”

Zero casualties. That's what the exterminator corps told them every morning. And this is how it got the number. A thousand and thirty-two families, people like him – speaking to a death mask week after week, feeling nothing more than a vague sense of wrongness.

“Wait,” Ghoul says. He shoulders past Gerard and stares at Michael, looking somehow even more shocked than Gerard feels. “That's fucking Kobra.”

“What?”

“My crewmate – guy on the fucking _screen_ back at the party. Wrong hair. But I swear. It's him.”

“If Michael were alive he'd _be_ here,” Gerard says. _He'd have come back to me._ “You heard the Corpse Ward.”

“The Casualty Ward,” it says.

“Whatever. The point is: if it's got their number, somebody killed them.”

Ghoul looks down and chews his lip – starts to say something and lets it drop.

“What?” Gerard asks.

“I almost did.” He brushes back the hair that's fallen across his face. “I mean if we're keeping score he tried to kill me first. He'd busted his leg in a high-rise – hurt himself real bad. His squad left him to die.”

He shouldn't trust Ghoul, Gerard thinks. It's too perfect an incentive to help him – and besides, Michael _would have come back_ – 

He doesn't have time for this.

“Why'd you make him say he'd help me?” he asks the Ward, wiping his eyes until he stops seeing double.

“Because you were the first citizen to call me in such obvious – ”

“ – pharmaceutical –”

“ – withdrawal. And the first with direct access to the high-security section of Battery City rehabilitation.”

Gerard looks into the eyes of the thing that is not his brother. “Why does that matter?”

“Because I have...”

“...a proposition.”

()()()

This is weird as fuck.

The middle of Batt City has a war memorial that's secretly full of droids that look like dead exterminators. The building, which is its own person that's some kind of combination of all of them, wants to cut a deal with them. It'll get them into the rehabilitation center tower and up the elevator, right where Gerard says Jet and Kobra are. And in return, they go back into the freezers and come back with...

“What do you mean, a girl?” Gerard asks. Ghoul's only consolation is that he seems every bit as confused about what the fuck is happening. “They're keeping children down there?”

“They don't consider her a child. They consider her an asset,” the Ward says. “Or a liability. The concepts are very similar.”

“And what is she really?”

“I don't know exactly. But they are –”

“ – frightened –”

“ – of her. This is a company that fears nothing.”

“Where do we take her?”

“Out of the city,” it says. “Fate can handle things from there.”

“Fate?” Gerard asks.

“Predestination. Prophecy. The stars. The general concept of –”

“Yeah. No. I get it. I just...”

“Yes?”

“I didn't expect a computer to be superstitious.”

There's an echo of laughter around the room. Ghoul's never going to get used to it. The Zone's got droids – he's disabled killswitches for a few of them and Jet's fixed plenty of energy cores. But they're just people with different insides. Not like this.

Witch, he just wants to fucking lie down here and never think about the city again.

“How exactly you figure we're gonna get back in?” Ghoul asks the Ward. “There's gonna be exterminators all over the place.”

“I identified the building's –”

“ – security –”

“ – guards some time ago and have cultivated certain relationships –”

“ – under false pretenses. One made me aware of a discreet –”

“ – emergency entrance –”

“ – with a three-hour rotating keycode. It is also valid for disabling the elevator's –”

“ – security –”

“ – failsafes.”

Ghoul thinks through his memories of the freezers. He's not even sure how long he's been in the city. Can't be more than a few days. Feels like fucking months.

“The doors down there are locked,” he says. “You got codes for them too?”

“The girl's door has no keypad. It requires a card –”

“ – available –”

“ – only to high-level exterminators. I can probably convince one of my contacts to acquire one within a week –”

“Wait. A fucking week?”

“It might seem unrealistically short, but I've been planning this a long time –”

“We don't have a week! We don't have a fucking day!” He stops, steadies his voice. “There's gotta be something faster.”

“I guarantee you. I've worked through this –”

“ – many, many –”

“ – times.”

Ghoul looks at Kobra – no, not Kobra, whatever Kobra _was_ before they met. The closer he gets, the more he sees wrong. The awkward posture, the glint from artificial eyes...

“Hey. Your bodies. Are they standard droid parts?”

“As far as I know. Why?”

Better Living builds its droids for loyalty. Most of them never run – they're too scared or stuck or programmed. But a few get out. And when they do, they make for a mechanic like Jet or a demolitionist like Ghoul. Because otherwise, they've got a cruelly randomized window of 24 to 72 hours before their central nervous core pings a beacon in the city, fails to find the signal, sends an electrical pulse into their sensory cortex...

And of all people, Gerard's the one who answers the Ward's question.

“We're going to blow the door open,” he says quietly. “Because the eyes explode.”

They are still, Ghoul reminds himself, absolutely fucked. But at least he'll go down doing what he's good at.

Gerard finds some heavy cutters in a maintenance closet three floors up. He snaps a link between the cuffs and Ghoul finally, gratefully pulls his arms into the jacket like a _normal person_ and zips it shut. Less than freezing for the first time since the Zones.

“I can probably get that one,” Gerard says, gesturing to Ghoul's neck. “If it's okay if I...”

“What?”

“If it's okay if I touch you again.”

 _Of course,_ Ghoul starts to snap. He's not fucking _fragile_. He's Fun Ghoul, the killjoy, the zonerunner, the one who throws punches in the pit at Mad Gear shows and gets the shit beat out of him and goes back the next night and finds the guy who did it and ends the night sweaty and half-naked with him in a pyrotechnics shed. But he's... relieved, he realizes. To be able to nod and feel like he's in control of something.

“Sure.”

Gerard brushes Ghoul's neck as he lifts the padlock. “I'll try not to, I don't know, cut your hair or anything. I was never any good at this.”

“You do a lot of breaking people out of handcuffs?”

“No! I mean... mechanical... stuff.”

“Man, no offense, but this isn't exactly a high-tech piece of gear.”

Gerard laughs. The chain tightens and then falls away as he cuts the lock with a metallic crunch, and Ghoul runs a hand over his throat, wincing at the cuts where it's pinched his skin.

“Are you okay – no, sorry,” Gerard says. “You aren't. You shouldn't be. I shouldn't have –”

“Don't worry about it. I'm sure as fuck better than I thought I'd be.”

“So... which ones are you gonna take?” he asks. “Maybe don't take Michael's –”

“Yeah. Digging my best friend's eyes out is not in the fucking plan.”

“Right.”

Gerard nods and drops his hand awkwardly, stands and heads for the stairs.

“What are you gonna do?” Ghoul asks.

“Loose ends to hash out with the Ward,” Gerard says. “I'll be back soon.”

Ghoul would rather not have an audience for this anyway.

The Ward opens the plexiglass wall separating him from its bodies. He finds himself staring into the face of a freckled man with skin so pale it's blueish – maybe accurate, maybe a mistake of Batt City's reconstruction. He wonders who's been calling this man in the city and talking to a ghost.

Everybody in the Zones lost someone in the Analog Wars. If they were lucky the person'd signed up like Ghoul had, died fighting with a mask on. Newsie would read the names out every evening and play them off with a track from some old record, while Kobra cleaned his gun or Jet picked at his guitar. Sometimes he envied the citizens in Batt City back then. He figured they were too drugged up to even notice when somebody was gone.

But at least in the desert, he'd had a way to say goodbye. He could visit the mailbox and ask the Witch to keep them safe on that long, last journey to She knew where. He thinks back to Gerard slamming the window and screaming at the thing he'd thought was somebody he loved.

Ghoul'd take the mailbox any day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. Basically I read _Dead Satellites_ and worked out a headcanon where the city _had_ to replace its citizens for some reason, and then decided to just write the precise opposite of Eco from [_House of Wires_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7874911/chapters/17984794).


	11. A Pocket Full Of Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: A kiss before dying.
> 
> B-Side: Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

> _Nine out of ten doctors agree that prolonged physical contact can lead to excess emotional arousal, decreased productivity, and wasted consumption opportunities. The tenth doctor has been referred to Battery City rehabilitative services._

Gerard finds Ghoul on the floor of the utility closet, sitting next to a neat row of eyeballs.

“The Ward has to make some phone calls,” Gerard tells him. “It says we've got a couple hours until it can get the code.”

“We don't have that long.”

“I know. But I don't think we can do anything about it.” He sits down across from Ghoul. “Might as well get a little sleep.”

The raygun shifts against his ribs. He unbuttons his blazer and sets it aside, examining the neatly clipped wires on the eyes.

“How'd you learn how to do this stuff?”

“Fucked around with broken shit, mostly. Whole lot of it in the desert. Got lucky and didn't blow myself up too bad.” Ghoul scoops the eyes up gently and places them on a shelf beside him. He's found some tape and padding and wrapped his hand with it, and with Gerard's jacket zipped up he could almost pass for simply tired instead of beaten to hell and back by...

Gerard has to stop thinking about that. He feels like he's standing on cracking ice, barely balanced on a fragile patch of stable ground. If he lets his mind wander toward anything with feeling, he'll plunge right through into airless depths of rage and fear and sorrow. Maybe this is what life was like before the pills. Maybe this is why he started taking them, because he just can't fucking _stand_ this...

“What's wrong?”

His vision's blurry again. He's got no right to cry in front of Ghoul, not after everything Ghoul's been through, and that just makes the tears fall even thicker, and he can't get air without his breath hitching into sobs – 

“Hey. Hey, it's okay.”

“No! No it isn't! It's never fucking going to be!” There's a reason he took the pills and it's because he's weak without them. If he felt numb it's because there was nothing to him once they took away the sorrow and the fear, but at least he wasn't just dead weight to somebody like Ghoul – a real, full human being. “All I do now is _feel_ things – like my mind's this open wound, like everything I think is dirt and salt and scum. And it doesn't do anything, it doesn't make things better, it doesn't help anyone. And I know you're being nice about it, like maybe you think this is a city thing, like maybe if you got me in the Zones I'd be different. But the problem isn't Battery City, Ghoul. The problem isn't Better Living. This is fucking _me_.”

He's got more to say, but his throat won't let him form words anymore and he has to close his eyes to keep the tears from burning. Ghoul is going to leave him now and he'll deserve it. The rest of them can go back to the Zones and he'll just stay here, lie around and talk to the Michael that he _didn't even notice_ wasn't human, and that should have been the tipoff right goddamn there – 

“Gerard – look, I don't know what you'd be like in the Zones. But it isn't this, because I've seen this. Every single person who gets out of Batt City. This is pill withdrawal.”

“No. I know what pills feel like. I know when I'm feeling things that aren't real – ”

“It is real.” He feels something against his skin. Ghoul's squeezing Gerard's hand, running his thumb over its tendons and knuckles in slow, reassuring strokes. “It's all real. It's just not forever.”

“I can't do this.”

Ghoul doesn't say anything. He just keeps his hold on Gerard's hand while Gerard cries, and when he's quiet Ghoul stretches out on the cement closet floor.

“C'mon. You were right. Let's get some sleep.” He stops and feels at the jacket pocket, and Gerard remembers suddenly that he left his printed Zone photo in there. Ghoul slides the paper out and unfolds it – not on the side of the photograph, but of Gerard's sketch.

“Hey. Don't – ”

Ghoul leans away so the dim light hits the drawing. It' even clumsier than Gerard remembers, but Ghoul looks at it intently.

“I, um... I didn't know you actually made things. Art. In there,” he says almost apologetically. “Who is it?”

“It's nobody. Just messing around.”

“Well, you should still name... name him? Her? Them?”

“I... them.” It feels strange – saying something BL/TV would never let him get away with. “And they... I don't know. How do you get names out there anyway?”

Ghoul shrugs and rolls onto his back, closes his eyes as he keeps talking. “Some people think real hard on it. Sometimes it's a nickname that sticks. Sometimes you, I dunno, find a bubblegum wrapper in a skeleton's pocket and look at the label and go, like – _damn, that's the one._ And some people get 'em from the Witch.”

“The witch?”

“The Phoenix Witch. She got born in the fires, 's how I always heard it. When the Grim Reaper got sick of counting the dead.”

“And people meet her?”

“In dreams.”

Gerard looks at the drawing again. “I don't dream,” he says. “And it's not like I'm making a TV show now anyway. Pretty sure I blew my shot at that.” He pushes away the memory of smoke and linen.

“Back there – when you got to the party,” Ghoul mumbles, sounding half-asleep. “Were you really planning all this?”

 _No point in lying._ “I don't know what I was planning. I just... I couldn't stand watching him hurt you. Or letting him use me as some kind of prop for it,” he says. “He was wrong, you know. When he said you were TV pretty.”

“What d'you mean?”

“It's something people say at BL/TV. Like... you catch a stranger's eye on the street. And something clicks and it's like you're watching them on a screen – because that's where they should be. Flawless and all sort of the same. I mean, I get where he was coming from. You've got... the thing that makes people want to stop and look at you. But, I don't know, something's off. You're not TV pretty. You're too interesting.” He doesn't mean anything by it. He's assessed dozens of aspiring BL/TV star headshots like this, objective and well-balanced. But off the pills he can't do objective. The whole thing comes out stupid and maudlin. “Dammit. I didn't mean it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I'm in love with you.”

That was supposed to sound objective too. Instead it comes out in a whisper. He's conscious of how small the closet is and how close Ghoul's body feels.

Ghoul opens his eyes and glances up at him. "Can you be in love?”

“I don't know.”

He's not sure how he would know. He's written a thousand romances and all they say is that love is inevitable: a strike of lightning or unstoppable tide that throws two impossibly charming people into each other's arms. It makes no sense and that's why BL/TV includes it in the system, because it demonstrates a fundamental truth: love is as realistic as the dragons in Fantasy TV.

If Gerard were in love it wouldn't feel so awkward to look into Ghoul's eyes, and he wouldn't be so worried that Ghoul might look away.

“Ghoul – do you think we're going to die tomorrow?”

“Dunno. Probably.”

“So if I do something stupid, I won't have to remember it very long.”

“Guess not.” Ghoul holds his gaze. “What do you want to do?”

Gerard lifts his hand slowly and touches his fingertips to Ghoul's face. He runs them down the soft skin of Ghoul's cheekbone, slides them along the hard ridge of his jaw above his spider tattoo. And this time Ghoul leans into his touch.

“I... I want to kiss you.”

Ghoul doesn't answer. He slides his hand up Gerard's neck, winds his fingers through his hair, and pulls him in.

Gerard can't remember the last time he kissed someone. But it couldn't have been like this – deep and slow and electric. The thrill of it reaches his heart, his hands, the parts of him that aren't supposed to do anything but obey the orders from his mind.

He stretches against Ghoul on the floor and wraps an arm around him lightly, trying not to touch the bruises underneath the jacket. He's conscious suddenly of how tired he is, how there is every chance they never make it out of Battery City, how this kiss feels not like a beginning, but an end.

What an end, though.

Ghoul's eyes are closed and his body is still; it's probably a miracle he's stayed awake as long as he has. Gerard folds the picture into his pocket before he lets his own exhaustion overtake him, and the last thing he remembers feeling is the touch of Ghoul's lips.

Gerard cannot dream – is what he thinks when the dream starts. The dream has no story to it, only feeling and color. Sand and desolation and the flash of a woman's unspeakable eyes. A voice that cuts like a razor and soothes like honey and reminds Gerard how he misses razors and honey, pain and beauty. She says something to him – but he isn't _him_ right now, he's something uncontainable, unbounded by the city. She speaks a name – but it isn't _his_ , it belongs to the thing of the dream, something wild and vicious and sweet.

He tries to hold onto the dream, but despite all his fighting it recedes. Until he is only Gerard, in a supply closet, with his arms around Ghoul and the name on his tongue. He whispers it under his breath.

But in the city and beyond the dream, its power is weakened. If anything it sounds a little ridiculous.

This character, the one who has no reason to exist anymore, is _not_ going to be named _Party Poison_.

()()()

Ghoul snaps awake to the call of a dozen dead voices and collects his extracted eyes and hopes to the fucking Witch that he isn't too late for Jet and Kobra.

“You have forty –”

“ – seven –”

“ – minutes until the change of the code,” says the Casualty Ward. “I estimate the distance to the –”

“ – rehabilitation center –”

“ – as a twenty-two minute walk. It is still before the lift of curfew. You should be able to travel –”

“ – undisturbed.”

Ghoul's chest tightens. He thinks for the hundredth time that he could cut and run as soon as they reach the elevator – forget the girl, save Jet and Kobra first. But he can't quite make himself decide to do it. He keeps thinking of a kid down in the freezers – stuck for so long that this droid-thing has been waiting who knows how many weeks or months or years to break her out.

“Okay,” he says with a sigh. “Let's light this place the fuck up.”

“Metaphorically,” Gerard mumbles. He looks exactly as nervous as Ghoul feels, and Ghoul finds that strangely reassuring.

Ghoul pulls his hood up. “Fuckin' _metaphorically_.”

Gerard stuffs the raygun back in his fancy suit jacket and runs fingers through his hair. Everything about him still looks expensive as shit, but the jacket's coated with dust and the hair's a lost cause, locks popping free and falling over his forehead.

Ghoul looks away before Gerard can catch him staring. He's still half-convinced he's sleeping – his body hurts like hell and he's faint with hunger and he's given up on anything, including and maybe especially his own brain, making any goddamn sense. And the last thing Gerard needs is to know is that he's working with someone who can barely figure out what's real.

“You ready?” Ghoul asks.

Gerard nods.

The Ward lights up the downstairs floors. “Our intelligence indicates that the girl should be at the far side of the –”

“ – rehabilitation center's –”

“– lower floor. As far back as you can get.”

This is it. One more time in the freezers. And one way or another, it's gonna be the last. He closes his eyes and tries to breathe as they descend.

“Destroya be with you,” the Ward says. A chorus of voices echo the word around the tower. _Destroya. Destroya. Destroya._

It's a name he never expected to hear in the city. The droids in the Zones talk about Destroya: machine-god sleeping in the desert, always gonna _wake up someday_ and rain fire on BL/ind. Ghoul figures he shouldn't call it a myth exactly – he believes in the Witch, after all. But the Witch watches over death. That's easy to understand. Something that's gonna free all the droids or bring the corporation to its knees – that's a hell of a reach.

If he's ever wanted to believe in it, though... well, now's the fucking time.

_Destroya be with us._

Whatever's kept Gerard safe walking around the city, it hasn't worn out yet. The streets are still empty and even though Ghoul swears the sun should have risen, the sky is dead and dark.

“We're here,” Gerard mutters.

Ghoul looks up to face a pair of glass towers. His heart leaps, and almost without realizing it, he reaches to take Gerard's hand. _Fuck_ , no. He cannot be weird about this right now, Ghoul thinks. He vaguely remembers touching Gerard – no, _kissing_ him – before they slept. But the further he gets from that moment the less sure he is that it happened. It seems too much like something he'd imagine. So he stops himself just in time and points to a flat panel in the far tower's crystalline wall.

“That the door?”

Witch, he sounds like an idiot. Of course it's the fucking door.

A billboard blinks the time as Gerard punches the code in: 06:37. Twenty-three minutes to get in, find the girl, and take the elevator all the way up.

The ground floor is dim and empty. Gerard points him to a pillar in the center, and at least Ghoul manages not to ask if that's the elevator – he just takes a deep breath and tells himself that this won't be like before. He's got a coat on his back and a pocket full of eyeballs and a partner who's at least a little less deliriously exhausted than he is.

As the elevator chimes, he hears muttering from the floors above and the stamp of feet. They must have a squad up the stairs somewhere.

“Come on,” Gerard whispers. “We can make it.”

Ghoul dodges inside and Gerard all but slams his fist into the buttons, like that's gonna make the doors close faster. Either way, they do – and the elevator descends.

The doors open onto a sickeningly familiar chill. It takes all Ghoul's effort to step back into that hallway. But he is not, he tells himself, going to look like a fucking coward in front of Gerard.

The blinding whiteness hurts his eyes. He staggers past the doors and wonders how many more people they're keeping down here. How far this damn hallway's going to stretch. _All you had to do was hit that elevator button. Up instead of down. Leave the girl behind._

He drives the thought out of his mind.

They turn the corner. Every door looks identical here, for all he knows the Ward was wrong about the keycard – 

“It's here.”

Gerard stops him midway down the hall and points to the left: a single door with a card slot. Ghoul grasps the handle and stands on his toes, looking through the small glass panel into the cell beyond.

The room is pristine white – but not the kind of sterile, empty place they kept him. There is a small bed with soft white blankets, a white carpet covering the floor. A stack of white blocks on a short white shelf. And at the center of it all, there is a girl in white, looking down at the white pages of a picture book.

Ghoul reaches for the eyeballs. He straightens the delicate wires and threads one through each hinge, praying the pins are weak enough to give. Backs up as Gerard hands him the raygun. He grits his teeth and grabs it, ignoring the sharp pain of his blisters. Two shots. That's all.

Two shots. Two sharp, explosive pops. Two mangled metal flowers where the hinges used to be.

Ghoul pulls at the gaps, ignoring the blood they're drawing from his fingertips. The door slides out. The girl looks up.

He... he should probably have thought of something to say.

Instead he just stands there staring at her. The girl looks barely old enough to walk – hell, barely old enough for him to guess she's a girl. She raises her head to meet his eyes: pure fascination without a trace of fear.

Gerard steps into the cell and kneels beside her. “Hey. Sorry to drop in like this,” he says with a smile. “But I guess it's usually pretty boring in here, right?”

The girl frowns and closes her book. She gives a curt nod.

“We're about to leave the city, actually. Go outside. Get some fresh air. And a friend, well – a friend said you might like to come with us.”

They can't have long left. And somehow Ghoul never considered that a small child might not want to run away with two total strangers, one of which probably looks like death right now.

Then the girl speaks.

“Friend?”

“I'm not sure if you know them. But they've been looking out for you. And they think this place is cold, and too bright, and it's probably... probably not very nice. In general.”

She nods, more slowly this time. “The screaming,” she says quietly.

“Right. Nobody likes the screaming.”

Ghoul wonders if she's ever _been_ anywhere else. Imagine thinking this awful place is normal, that this is as good as things get.

“How... long?”

“How long are we gonna be out there? As long as you want. But I think... I think you're really gonna like it.”

The girl looks over at Ghoul. He nods and tries to smile in a way that shows he's _definitely_ seen a child recently and that he is _not_ terrified of keeping a tiny fragile person safe while he can barely keep himself standing.

“We gotta go soon, though,” Gerard says – how does he sound so calm right now? “There's some bad guys after us.”

“The screaming.”

“Yeah. They're the ones who make that happen. And if you come with us, I promise... you're never gonna have to hear it again.”

Gerard holds out his hand. The girl looks at it like she's never seen one before. Slowly, she wraps her tiny fingers around his thumb. _Thank the fucking Witch,_ Ghoul starts to whisper, before he remembers that he _thinks_ you're not supposed to swear in front of kids.

“Ready,” the girl says. “Ready to leave.”

“Sounds good.” Gerard stands and turns to Ghoul. “Okay. Let's go.”

Ghoul hesitates. He should be relieved – they're one goddamn elevator ride away from Jet and Kobra and freedom. But the girl's words won't stop echoing in his head.

_The screaming._

“How much time do we have?”

“Eleven minutes.”

“Then go upstairs. Get safe,” he says. “But there's still people in here. I'm gonna get out as many as I can.”

He waits for Gerard to tell him he's being stupid or let him go without a fight. The city teaches people not to care. The person he met a few days ago wouldn't have thought twice before he left. And yes Gerard's saved him more than once and yes he never even suggested leaving the girl but...

“I'll do it,” Gerard says.

“What?”

“Give me the eyes and the gun. Take the girl and the elevator. I'll be right behind you.”

“No. This was my idea – ”

“Artists steal ideas.”

“I –”

“Ghoul. You look awful. Don't pretend you can do this.” Gerard takes an anxious look down the hallway. “Please. Let me stay. I... I didn't do all this just to lose you.”

And Ghoul realizes that Gerard must have a point – because he's too tired to even argue with it.

“Okay. New plan. You go with my friend, and I'll be there in a few minutes,” Gerard tells the girl. “I promise. Not a single person in the city who can stop me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not _only_ going for narrative convenience here, I have a strong conviction that "Party Poison" is something you'd hear in a dream and then you wake up and realize it sounds kind of weird and awkward but you're Gerard Way so you roll with it and everything is fine.


	12. Something True And Cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Party Poison is too fast to live and too young to die.
> 
> D-Side: Kobra. Has. Found family.

> _Battery City is safe. Battery City is clean. Battery City is the only choice. For today's discerning consumer._

Ghoul and the girl disappear behind the elevator door, and Gerard tells himself he wasn't lying.

Here's what is true: Gerard Way, Better Living Television employee, Tier +1, stands no chance here whatsoever. He has a handful of explosives he's watched exactly one person use, a gun he's fired once, and nine minutes to do anything at all.

But a zonerunner – a zonerunner would not fuck this up. _Party Poison_ would stand a chance of getting back up that elevator.

So never mind Gerard. Here's Party Poison.

He... no, that's not right, Party Poison is _they_. They roll the word around in their head and expect it to feel like a costume. It's... more like finding a pair of shoes that fit for the first time. They can think about that later.

They scan the hallway and pick a door. The window looks onto an empty room.

Another. Another.

They finally get one: a shorn-headed man huddled in the corner of a cell. And because they _do not fuck things up_ , they remember the way Ghoul threaded the eyes and stood clear to aim the gun. And so what if they miss twice, three times, maybe a few more and – okay. Finally. They get it eventually. That's what matters.

The man looks up wild-eyed as they pull the door free, and Poison lifts a hand in a gesture of non-threatening greeting. “Hey. I'm gonna get you out of here.”

They help the man up and out to the hallway. There. One down, more to – 

The elevator chimes. The door opens.

“Well,” says Korse. “It's you.”

Poison freezes. The man scrambles back into the cell behind them, and they start to raise their pistol – but Korse has already unholstered his.

“Drop the gun, Gerard. I don't think you're ready to actually shoot anyone. But I _was_ curious what you'd do with it.”

“Do with – ”

Korse keeps his own gun trained on Poison. “Come on. You thought we'd let you walk out without checking security footage? Or not notice that a fugitive's weapon was gone?”

“Yeah?” He's playing mind games. Ignore it. “So why'd I get to keep it?”

“Because I didn't expect that kind of initiative. I wondered where it would take you. And here – were you looking for the zonerunner?”

“Ghoul's gone. Made it without me.”

“I see. So it was..."

"Nobody should be stuck in here. Thought I'd get them out."

"So it was a _jailbreak._ One that failed to save a single person.”

 _A single person._ Then Korse doesn't know about the girl. It sounds like he might not even know about Leith – like he doesn't think they'd be capable of doing anything at all. Not that it helps Poison now, because they've got the head exterminator between them and the elevator. There's no way out this time. But maybe they can stall and give Ghoul a chance.

“I had to try.”

“Did you?”

“What else was I supposed to do? Make another show so nobody thinks too hard? Get executives to pat me on the head for it?"

"You're supposed to do _what you're supposed to do._ "

"Would _you_ be happy with that? You really go home and watch TV at night? You don't even dress right for this place. You look like – hell, like a zonerunner." 

It's a throwaway comment – Poison just can't think of anything else that fits the weird lace cuffs and waistcoat and all the rest of it. But Korse looks at them closely.

“They didn't call us zonerunners.”

“What?”

Korse glances back into the hallway, the kind of surreptitious check everybody gives the city before they say something dangerous. Poison's not sure what the _head exterminator_ could say that would get _him_ in trouble. Who he'd even get in trouble with.

“There were no Zones when we started," Korse says. "We didn't have silly names or rayguns. We were crews, gangs, friends – people who kept things together while the world fell apart. Or that's what we thought, anyway.”

“After the fires – ”

“Before the fires. During. And then after. But not for long.”

Poison doesn't need their watch to know they're out of time. The code is useless. But at least Korse keeps talking. And what he's saying... they hear the barely suppressed venom beneath his words, and they get the feeling it's not a lie.

“The Zones eat people," he says with a strange, vicious calm. "You can pretend it's romantic for a while. _Live fast, die young._ And then the penny drops. You watch your best friend cut his leg in a junkyard and get killed by some infection the city could cure with a pill. _Leave a beautiful corpse._ You watch your lover lie under the sun until his skin peels off and his eyes burn out, because he's got no hope that any day will be better than the last. _Better to burn out than fade away_ – oh, and then it comes for you. You go into the blast zone too deep, too soon, and you come out with your body full of poison. Zone sickness. Permanent. Slow. Fatal – until the corporation, the enemy, _the Man_ gives you a way out. And you realize that... your friends might say they love you. But in the end that's worthless. Because Better Living can _help_ you.”

“Like it helped Ghoul.”

“Like it could have if he'd let it.”

“You know what they almost did to him at the party?”

“No. And I'm never going to.”

“Leith tried to – ”

Korse levels the gun again. “I told you – I'm _never_ going to. Battery City is the last chance we have for a future. The executives keep it running. We do what we need to keep _them_ running. As they say upstairs, the aftermath is secondary.”

“Do you really buy that?”

“I think you're intelligent. So I think you will too.”

“Fuck you,” Poison spits. “I'll make you kill me first.”

“I'm not going to kill you. And I'm not going to keep you here.”

Korse keeps the gun raised. But he steps aside, and Poison takes in the clear path to the elevator with suspicion.

“If you go up there I assume you'll die, of course. I won't stop the exterminators,” he says. “But if you make it out... you'll see what zonerunners really are. You'll learn how to live with them. And when you're ready – when you finally understand why this city matters – you'll come back and help protect it like I did.”

Poison hesitates. “What if I don't?”

“Then I will chase you to the end of the desert. I will exterminate your friends one by one. I'll wait for the Zones to eat you too. And when it's done I'll be the only one left who remembers you lived at all.”

It's a trick, Poison thinks. It must be. But it's not like they can make things worse for themselves. They glance at the cell's empty doorway – wonder if they could have saved anybody, if they could ever have been good enough. Then they hit the button and wait breathless for the chime. As the door opens, they take one last look back.

“Someday you're going to wish you'd killed me.”

“I don't wish,” says Korse. “They make a pill for that.”

()()()

Kobra almost shoots Ghoul.

But he doesn't.

That's good.

It's not like he could have predicted Ghoul just coming up the fucking elevator. Has a kid now. Odds were already a thousand to one against seeing him again. So Kobra's not even sure that part counts as weird.

“Holy shit. Holy _fucking shit._ ” Jet's got his arms around Ghoul, like they're not all still about to die. Lets go, steps back, looks at this girl all in white. “You have so much to explain right now.”

Kobra clears his throat. “We should leave.”

But Ghoul gives him a look Kobra can't place. Like Ghoul's trying to decide whether to say something. Not a typical problem.

“We can't leave yet,” he says finally. “We have to wait for Gerard.”

“What?” Kobra's tired. Just hearing things.

“Gerard. I, um... I think he's your brother.”

Maybe Ghoul's joking.

“I never said I had a brother.”

“Well, do you?”

Kobra hesitates and nods tightly. He knows he doesn't want whatever's coming next.

“I met him. And he fucking saved me, man. And he's just down the elevator, and –”

“We're wasting time.”

“I told you, he's _just down there_. I know it sounds weird as hell but I swear I'm not making this up –”

“I don't care if it's true,” Kobra snaps. “It just doesn't matter.”

Ghoul goes quiet. He's got that expression people get around Kobra sometimes. When he says something true and cold. When he closes that GOOD LUCK visor and walks away before he can wonder if he should've said it.

“I'm not leaving him,” Ghoul says.

“Then you don't know him.”

And _that_ , Kobra is sure of. He never met anybody who fit better with BL/ind. All the right clothes. The right job. Probably runs their propaganda now. If Gerard helped Ghoul, whatever fucking reasons he had... they're not ones that end with him leaving Batt City.

Kobra looks at Jet for backup. But Jet's got his eyes trained on the door.

“I don't know who you're talking about,” he says. “But we gotta make a call on this. BL/ind's sick of waiting.”

Something slams the other side of the door. They all flinch, except the girl.

“We can't stay here,” says Kobra.

“He's your family, Kobra. You know what I would _give_ to have family?”

“You have family. So do I. It isn't him.” Kobra pops his raygun open and slots his last battery into the grip. “And I don't risk my family's life for strangers.”

The door slams again, louder. Ghoul's swaying on his feet. Dead pale.

“We can wait,” he says – but his voice is weaker, just a plea. “We can hold them off.”

The metal is groaning. Jet grabs the gun Kobra knows is empty. Ghoul finally drops and holds the girl close, lets her bury her face in some weird city jacket. Kobra takes his sunglasses from his pocket and lets the world darken.

Die with your mask on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Kobra. I know his thing is supposed to be kung fu and some kind of weaponized Nintendo Power Glove, which is obviously cool, but I got this image of him as a laconic Clint Eastwood gunslinger and couldn't let it go.
> 
> I've seen at least one fic (with a clever _Invisibles_ reference) where Korse has a past as a zonerunner. I assume there are more, because it feels like it explains a lot about him.


	13. Zonerunner, Run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: A message from our sponsors.
> 
> B-Side: _Fucking_ elevators.

> _Better Living Television is experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by._

With every vertical foot, Poison waits for the elevator to stop.

Their watch says 7:11. If Ghoul's smart, he'll have given up on them. Poison's going to walk into a room that's either empty or full of exterminators, and they'll be happy to do it. Because that means they've done what they meant to. Even if it's the end of Party Poison's short and wondrous life.

An indicator light flashes: _PANOPT_.

The door opens, and Poison stares down the barrel of a raygun. This time, an exterminator's not behind it. It takes a moment to figure out who is.

“Michael?”

Their brother is blond now and his eyes are walled behind dark glasses. But this is really him. And for the first time since the war, he looks _alive_.

“My name's not Michael.” Right – _Kobra_ , Ghoul had called him. But the voice is unmistakably their brother's. “Gerard?”

Poison takes a breath and steps out of the elevator.

“My name's not Gerard.”

Kobra's face is unreadable. He keeps the gun trained on Poison, and they could almost laugh – they've gotten through executives and security systems and Battery City's head exterminator, and they're going to get killed by their _brother._ Then the door crashes. Kobra whips his head and his gun toward a wall of exterminators. And Poison shoulders past him. They put on the pained smile that they remember from a hundred failed propaganda takes – the one that conveys _somebody_ has fucked up and the director is doing the favor of not reporting them.

“You're early.”

The lead exterminator raises a fist, and the men behind him stop short.

“Identify yourself,” he says sharply.

“Your BL/TV liaison. You _idiot_.”

The exterminator tilts his head – the only way anybody could tell that he's thinking. “We liaise directly with the chief executive televisor.”

“So call him.”

Poison keeps the smile up and ignores the pounding of their heart. Because there's no point in being afraid now. Either the Casualty Ward delivered on their plan and made its vidcall to the tower... or every single one of them is dead.

The exterminator hits the button for his earpiece. It's just loud enough for Poison to make out the cool voice of Leith's droid.

“Can I help you?”

“Put me through to Leith.”

“Mr. Leith is occupied. I believe he sent a subordinate to coordinate with you this morning.” She tinges her voice with polite condescension. “Did you attend your notifications?”

The exterminator looks up at Poison, and they suddenly wish they'd done a better job of dusting off their suit.

“What's his authority level?”

“His authority level,” the droid says, “is complete.”

Poison makes a show of rolling their eyes.

“Have we wasted enough time now? Get your primary bodycam up here. We've made some changes to the blocking.”

The cammed exterminator steps forward hesitantly. Poison pulls the little camera off his chest and holds it.

“Now – call fifteen squads just outside Tower Prime.”

“That's beyond our capacity – ”

“Then _you_ get down the elevator and do it.”

The lead exterminator eyes the scene behind them.

“Oh, come on. Do you think the zonerunners are really a threat?” Poison snaps. “They're trapped. Their guns are dry. One of them can barely walk. And _you're_ going to come around the tower, get steady tracking up the stairwells, and come across that bridge guns blazing. Don't you think that'll look better?”

“And what about you... sir?”

“I've got shots to get from the bridge. Give me ten minutes up here.” Any luck, and they'll have annoyed the exterminator so badly that he won't bother worrying about their safety. “Well? Are you going to –”

“Yes. Yes... _sir_. We'll meet you at the other side.”

“Oh – and tell the droid to change the broadcast levels, will you?” Poison says as the man hits the call button. “She'll know what I mean.”

Any more luck, and Leith's droid – whose name they still don't know, and now will never learn – is making a call to BL/TV Central. Leith's authority is overriding the scheduled standard- and high-class programming for a bulletin: a single audiovisual feed from the camera in Poison's hand.

The exterminators are gone. Poison covers the lens and mic and takes a glance back at Ghoul and Michael – no, _Kobra_.

“I hope you've actually got a way out of here,” they whisper. “And I hope we can get there _real_ fast.”

Kobra nods silently. The other zonerunner gets the girl in his arms, and Kobra pulls Ghoul to his feet. Poison keeps the lens covered and hangs back. From now on, all they can do is trust. And talk.

They take a step onto the bridge and raise their camera out across the city.

“This is Battery City, brought to you by Better Living Industries.” Poison spent long enough shooting newsreels to get a narrator's inflections down pat. “Better Living has been devoted to a clean and structured lifestyle since 2012. But for our standard- and high-class customers, there may be a few _amenities_ you're not familiar with.”

They sneak a glance toward Tower Prime. The rest are almost to the other side, even if Ghoul looks like he might collapse without Kobra's help.

“Did you know: there's a class of law enforcement above the exterminators? They're called draculoids. You take an ordinary person, and you burn out all their thoughts and memories. No shopping. No television. No _family_. Who knows? You could be one tomorrow!”

The rest are almost through the door. The girl gives Poison a slightly suspicious look. Poison gives her a smile.

“Now, you've probably never seen a draculoid. But I bet you've thought about rehabilitation. And that... well, doesn't that ever feel weird? Always having that fear in the back of your mind – that you're going to say the wrong thing or _see_ the wrong thing and then just disappear one day? Do you even remember that we didn't used to live like this?”

Poison's heart is triphammering and every inch of their body wants to start running. They keep their steps even, try to maintain some semblance of a camera pan. From the bridge Battery City looks smaller than ever – a cluster of skyscrapers under a false dawn.

“Not _all_ of us, though. Because if you're an executive, you get whatever you want. Remember fresh food? They get it. Real art made by people? They get it. They could probably tell an exterminator to shoot you right in front of your kids, and nobody would stop them. Oh, right – remember having kids without an application? Going out with somebody you didn't meet at a pairing center? Doesn't that sound _fun_?

“And seriously, I don't know where I'm going with this. Last week, on the pills... _I_ wouldn't have listened to me. But maybe sometimes you wake up at night and everything feels wrong. Maybe you smile and realize you can't remember being happy. Maybe you watch Romance TV and wish you knew what it was like to fall in love. And then you'll remember that _one person_ cracked your TV feed by themselves to say this.” _Please let them believe this. Please don't get the droid or the Casualty Ward hurt._ "Imagine what all of us could do."

They can't think about Ghoul. They can't think about his lips and his hands. They can't think of anything that will remind them how impossible their whole world feels. Instead they stop and put the smile back on. They turn the camera and stare into its eye.

“I'm Party Poison,” they tell the city. “And I approve this fucking message.”

Then they grip its cheap white plastic and throw it as far off the bridge as they can manage. They watch it arc into thin air and fall, gathering terminal velocity toward the pristine, unforgiving ground.

Poison runs.

()()()

Ghoul's world has never been anything but fucking elevators, he decides. Everything else is a hallucination. Kobra's arm supporting him, Gerard – whose name is no longer Gerard and well fuck, Ghoul's gonna have to ask about that one – tapping a watch to a pad on the top floor, Jet holding the girl...

No, man. Just elevators.

“How'd you get in here anyway?” the person who's not named Gerard is asking Kobra.

“Blew a door open in a sub-basement. Got a car in the tunnel. Don't think they found it.”

Witch – Jet and Kobra drove the Trans Am all the way into Batt City. Just to get him. He knows he should be furious about it, that by rights they should be ghosted. But he just wants to fucking grab onto them and never let them go.

The elevator comes to rest. Something's gone wrong, Ghoul thinks frantically. He's going to wake up in the freezers again with Korse and this will start all over. Or he's not going to wake up at all, because without Leith, there's no reason to keep any of them alive.

Instead the doors open and they stumble down a flight of stairs and the air cools – not the icy chill of the freezers, but the dank, mildewed scent of unused space. This isn't Batt City anymore. It's something older.

“Almost there,” says Kobra.

Something's got to happen. The car'll be surrounded by dracs. Or a tire'll be flat. Or the Witch will just appear right in front of them and smite them dead. Because _that_ is just Ghoul's luck.

He keeps thinking of disasters till he's stuffed in the back seat between the girl and whoever Gerard is going to be, till Jet hits the gas and the Trans Am shoots out like an arrow through Batt City's heart.

The last thing he remembers is the texture of a dusty black lapel against his face and warm fingers in his hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I take back what I said earlier about downplaying the on-air executions. Clearly BL/TV overreacts because last time they let their guard down for a minute, they got _this_.
> 
> I also did not start this fic expecting Gerard/Poison to become some kind of roving guilt katamari.


	14. Crushed Diamond Lights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A-Side: Guilt and target practice.
> 
> B-Side: Hair dye and desert nights.

> _We at Better Living Television offer our deepest apologies for an unscheduled service interruption. Better Living is pleased to offer complimentary and mandatory psychological evaluations for trauma related to the unapproved broadcast experienced by some citizens. Now, and always: have a better day._

Gerard Way is dead.

The television storylines he worked on will never be completed. The career he built was detonated in a single day. The city he understood is lost to him forever. And in his place is a character who's barely lived except on paper, dropped onto what might as well be another planet. Party Poison.

It's Poison who marvels at the emptiness as they reach the end of the tunnel. Poison who steps out when the car stops beneath a crumbling desert overpass, leaving Ghoul and the girl sleeping in the back seat, Ghoul's hair falling across his face like a veil. Poison who introduces themselves to a man in mirrorshade sunglasses and a leather jacket.

“Car's clean,” says Jet Star as he climbs back to his feet. “Never seen cameras this deep in the Zones. Might be dracs, but we can spot 'em from a mile away out here.”

Poison nods like they've got any idea what they're doing.

“I'll go up and take a watch. Don't see anybody in a couple hours, we can go crash. Unless... unless Ghoul needs a serious medic or anything.”

Poison can hear the unspoken question: _what did they do to him in there?_

“I'm... I'm not sure,” they say. “I think he needs rest.”

Jet disappears up the concrete rubble, leaving them alone with Kobra.

Poison can't quite bring themselves to look him in the eye. _I didn't know you were here. I could have come after you_ – but that's a lie. _I missed you_ – too complicated to explain how that's true. _I love you..._

“Nice jacket,” they settle on.

Kobra looks frozen for a second. “Thanks.”

“I... I watched you fight. It was really... good...”

“Who's the girl?” asks Kobra abruptly.

Poison explains as best they can: the memorial, the freezers, the girl. And Kobra nods pensively and furrows his brow, and Poison is relieved at the sudden flash of familiarity that brings.

“So they're gonna come after us,” Kobra says.

“I'm sorry.” Poison thinks back to Korse's words. “I think so.”

“They always do.”

“I'm... I should have left the city. Before things got so bad.”

Kobra fidgets with his raygun's grip. “You know... I was an exterminator for months,” he says. “Did a lot of stuff should've made me change sides.”

“You did.”

“Not soon enough.”

Poison tries to think of a way to ask the question they've been going over for hours. Fuck it, they figure. They've got nothing to lose.

“What am I gonna do now?”

Kobra frowns. “You're gonna come with us.”

“I'm no good to you. Michael – Kobra – I make _television_. That's not exactly a translatable fucking skill set.”

“So what? You wanna go back?”

 _When you finally understand why this city matters, you'll come back._ “Of course not,” they say. “I'm just... I don't want to be useless.”

“We're all useless. At first.”

“You were an ext– ”

“So I could shoot. Didn't know shit about living in the Zones.” He sits in the sand and pulls his raygun, polishing it on his apple-red sleeve. “Question isn't what you can do. It's whether you're gonna let people help you.”

Poison sits beside Kobra and waits. The desert stays silent.

The dracs never come. Jet Star comes down from the overpass. They take another drive to a desolate roadside motel, a low row of sand-scarred doors beneath a crackling neon sign, and Jet drops a handful of black coin on the counter.

“Shit, we should get you some clothes,” he tells Poison as they walk back to the car. “And a mask.”

He says it so easily, like Poison is already part of the crew. But all they can think is _of course_ , even their clothes are wrong, like a tourist in a country they never meant to visit. The girl eyes Jet calmly and announces that she's thirsty, and Poison realizes they are too – parched and starving and not even sure what they can expect to eat.

They are going to earn this. They are going to learn.

Ghoul doesn't move when they open the car door. Jet carries him to the suite and lays him on a bed, and Poison makes themselves look at his sickening bruises and the fresh crimson blooming around BL/ind's staples. Jet evaluates the wounds efficiently and sends Kobra back to the car for bandages and disinfectant, and Poison gets a stab of something they haven't felt in a long time: jealousy.

Inside the city Ghoul needed them – even seemed to want them. Now he's got people who can help him better than Poison ever could. For all they know he's got a lover. And out here they can't impress him with expensive clothes or awards or lines cribbed from a TV script. Out here they've got nothing at all.

When Ghoul's cuts are clean and his injured hand is wrapped, and Jet's bought some stale fried dough and a canteen of water for the rest of them, Kobra gets Poison a white raygun from a vending machine. He lines a row of rusted cans atop a wall and watches Poison fail to hit a single one.

“Try it closer. Get a feel for aiming.”

Poison shakes their head and tries another round, because goddammit, this is the _price of entry_ for the Zones. So Kobra shrugs and shows them how to stand straight and get a two-handed grip and line up the pistol sights, and Poison's got just enough patience to not point out that _he_ shoots one-handed like a gunslinger from an old western.

As Kobra turns his back, they realize there's something nagging at the back of their mind. “Hey,” they say. They unfold the printout from their pocket. “Is this where we lived before the city?”

Kobra examines the row of ruined houses. Slowly, he shakes his head. “No. But it looked a lot like it.”

“Why did we leave? How did we get to the city?”

“It was your call.” Kobra looks at Poison. “Do you remember any of it?”

They're so used to saying _no_ – not only because Battery City would accept no other answer, but because if they slip beneath the surface of their memories, the weight of whatever's there might crush them. But it might as well happen here beside their brother, under the open sky.

_It is 2012. The old city is filthy and sprawling, and in the evening an unfiltered sun refracts its last light through gasoline haze. They live where the skyscrapers shrink to neat rows of trees and quiet streets, where housepaint comes in the approved colors of a homeowner's association. They are sixteen and all they think about is leaving – to the grime of downtown, to the bohemia of Brooklyn or Seattle, to anywhere else their parents warn them against._

_Their father works late in the city, pushing paper in a cement tower. Their mother strong-arms them into a country club dinner and introduces them to blond girls with rich names, while they watch their brother disappear behind the kitchen doors to steal a bottle of stupidly expensive wine. And then somewhere between the Blairs and the Paisleys, the walls shiver and the champagne glasses crack. A great brightness grows outside the windows, and their first thought is not fear but excitement._

_Something has finally happened in the suburbs._

_The excitement – it passes in minutes but it's slashed their mind like a knife. Through the chorus of screams that follow. Through the mad rush for cars and cellphones. Through the moment their mother tells them to stay put and walks dazed into the city, as if she might get their father out all by herself._

_All they can think is that they watched a wave of death and found it_ interesting.

_When they hear of a white van out on the highway, with offerings of pills and nepenthe, they step inside and tell their little brother to never look back. Because whatever it makes them, it couldn't be worse than what they are._

“I should have let you pick,” they tell Kobra. “We might have died. But we could have found something better.”

Kobra nods.

“Guess so,” he says. “Probably the first one.”

He leaves Poison with extra batteries.

They start hitting cans just as the sun fades and their last battery goes dry. Back inside the suite Jet's got a guitar and a look of quiet concentration, and Kobra's jacket is folded over a chair.

“Ghoul's still sleeping,” Jet says. “Got Kobra watching the girl. About to pass out myself.”

They spend their first night in the Zones on the hard springs of a fold-out sofa stained with cigarette burns. The next morning Jet drives them and the girl to a desert market, and it strikes them again that they've got _nothing_ , not even the money for old jeans and a faded shirt, not even a clue how they'd get the money except through Jet.

It probably has something to do with the guns.

By the second day they can get a few good shots every round. They move back a few meters and start again.

Ghoul is still sleeping whenever they come inside. At least, that's what it looks like. Poison can't help wondering if he's avoiding them. Maybe they remind him of the city. Maybe he still hasn't forgiven them for that first meeting. Maybe he's just sick of them.

On the third morning Poison hits every single can in a row. Just luck, but they'll take it – 

“Nice shooting.”

They turn to see Jet Star leaning against the stucco wall.

“You saw it?”

“Them and the last hundred shots.” He pulls a flask from his jacket pocket and offers it to Poison, unscrews the cap and takes a drink when they refuse. “You don't have to do this, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Become a crack shot overnight. Or a hard case. Or a killjoy.”

Poison feels their face flush in the heat. “Is it that obvious?”

“It's normal. Everybody from the city thinks they've gotta _be_ something, like they don't deserve to live unless they pass a fuckin' test.” He takes another drink. “Don't think I've seen anybody get it quite this bad, though. Not even Kobra.”

“Not like I've got anything else to do.”

“Witch, just come inside sometime. Get some food. See the girl. Say hi to Ghoul.”

“He doesn't want to see me.”

“Not sure he knows what he wants.” Jet shrugs. “He took a pretty bad beating in there, didn't he?”

“Yeah.”

“That all they did to him?”

Poison avoids Jet's eyes. “Ask him yourself.”

“He'll tell me when he wants to,” Jet says. “But look – you're the only one of us knows what went down without asking. If he needs someone he doesn't have to talk to... well, shit, that sounded nicer in my head.”

Poison laughs. Jet cracks a smile.

“Just believe me. You're one of us,” he says. “You don't have to prove it.”

They are not the sixteen-year-old staring into the light of the bombs, they tell themselves. They are not their worst moment.

They have always been better than that.

()()()

Ghoul keeps thinking he's got that goddamn chain around his neck.

He wakes up and it's always there for a minute. He sleeps and it weighs on him in dreams. He doesn't do much else. His body feels soured, like everything they did to him in the city is stuck in his flesh like bad ink. When Jet brings him a fresh shirt and a cup of ramen he eats ravenously and throws it up. When he wakes up and sees Kobra sitting beside him he sends him away; Kobra's got real family now anyway. When Party Poison – because that's their name now, Jet says – shows up, he keeps his eyes closed. He doesn't want them to keep seeing him like this: weak, exhausted, helpless.

There's a knock on the door, the sharp triple-rap that Jet always uses.

“Yeah?”

Jet unzips his jacket and reaches inside. “Got your mask and gun. Been keeping them for you.”

 _Lot of good I did with them,_ Ghoul thinks. But Witch knows he never expected to see them again.

“Thanks.”

“There anything else –”

“I'm fine.”

“Come on. None of us are fine.” Jet sets his things on a side table and sits at the edge of the bed. “I thought we were ghosted back there. Kobra and I opened the door to that bridge, whole crew of exterminators – had the fuckin' shakes. Like we were gonna die in that goddamn tomb of a city –”

“Don't bullshit me. You looked fine. Nobody could tell.”

Jet looks at him. “What?”

Fuck. He hasn't told Jet about the fucking party. The chain. Leith.

“Did Ge – did Poison say anything?” he asks, heart hammering. “About... about inside?”

“They said you'd tell me. If you wanted to.”

He's not sure if he's relieved the rest don't know, or if he just wishes it was out of the way already. If he wishes Jet already understood how pathetic he'd been.

“They had cameras on you in the city. Their... television advisor or something planned it. It was all a fucking game.” He squeezes his burned hand with its missing nail to keep the pain physical. His vision is blurry and his words crack anyway. “It was a fucking game and I played.”

BL/ind was scared of them once. Now they might still call themselves killjoys, they might still think they're fighting.... but to the city they're just toys.

“We all played.”

“Not like me.”

Jet says nothing. He pulls Ghoul up gently and wraps his arms around him, lets Ghoul bury his face in warm leather.

"Tell me I'm not worthless," Ghoul whispers.

"What?"

"Tell me I'm not broken. Tell me I'm not pathetic. Tell me I'm not weak. I don't care if you're lying–"

"Stop that." Jet pulls him back to look at him. "You're not any of it. And I'm not fucking lying. I..." He looks at his hands. "I watched the whole goddamn tape they sent us. I cleaned a fucking _foot_ of cuts. I don't know everything they did in there. But I know _way_ more than enough to know you're not fucking weak."

They are silent for a long time.

“Your hair's growing out,” Jet says finally. He touches the roots where flat black fades to chestnut.

“That you offering to dye it?”

“It's my turn with the girl. Get Poison to do it,” Jet says. “Maybe it'll get them to finally come in.”

“Come in from where?”

“They decided they're gonna learn to outshoot Kobra their first week in the Zones. Gonna chew through our whole battery stack if you don't chill them out.”

Of course. The Zones were freedom for Ghoul. But Poison was _somebody_ in the city, and now they're starting back from zero. Maybe they'd have been happier if they stayed. Even if that meant death for Jet and Kobra, and probably something worse for him.

Jet lets him go and straightens his jacket. “You know – doesn't matter if it was a game. What matters is, we won,” he says. “And now, if you don't mind, I'm gonna go feed a mysterious child you rescued from a high-security prison in the middle of Batt City. Not sure how you think that's anything but fucking cool.”

“Hey,” Ghoul says before he leaves. “The girl. She got a name?”

“Not yet. Got some books to read her at the flea market. Maybe she'll find one.”

Jet was right – it's almost dark and Poison is halfway across the parking lot from a row of half-charred cans, setting themselves up for a string of impossible shots. They actually _make_ one of them. Then they look up from the sights at Ghoul. They open their mouth but seem to reconsider speaking, wait and reconsider again, and finally stand there frozen with the raygun like a drac has caught them stealing contraband.

“So,” Ghoul says. “Um... you wanna help fix my hair?”

The dye's a faded box with a smiling old-world fashion model; Jet must've picked it up at the flea market. Poison pores over the instructions with the kind of focus they might give a goddamn nuclear launch manual, until Ghoul finally takes the box from them.

“Seriously, you just mix some stuff in a bowl and paint it on and leave it,” he tells them. “Not a whole lot going on there.”

“I want to get it right. I'm not fucking up your hair my first week in the Zones.”

“Well, it'd be the least fucked-up part of me right now.”

He means it as a joke. Instead Poison looks up at him cautiously – the bandage still on his hand, wrists raw from days in handcuffs, shirt loose to let Korse's cuts heal.

“It's not that bad. Really,” he says quickly, cracking the box and handing over the dye tubes. “Messed up the tattoos a little, but you know, crash queens dig scars –”

“I should have stopped him.”

“What – Korse?”

“Korse. Leith. I don't know.”

“And how exactly were you gonna do that?”

“I could have found a way.”

“Really?”

Poison pauses to saw the dye open. They stir it with mechanical precision, way too long.

“No.”

Ghoul passes them the brush. “If you wanna feel bad about it, that's okay. I think sometimes you gotta do that to feel better. Even for shit that's not your fault,” he says. “But you can't get to thinking it _is_ your fault. And don't get the dye on my face.”

Poison slides their fingers through his hair, drawing the brush over the first section.

“What do you do all day here?” they ask.

“Survive. Some people don't bother with much more than scavenging. Radio station's got a good lineup –”

“I mean you. Personally.”

“Can never be too good at blowing shit up. And besides that... I don't know. Comics. Mad Gear shows. Running the 'Am with Jet and Kobra...”

They're actually good at this, Ghoul realizes. Long, firm, measured brush strokes. Like an artist.

“People like... date out here?”

“I...” Ghoul hesitates. “Why?”

“I – I don't know. I just... I've got these pictures in my head of what's normal. But it's all just television. When I think about anything real... it's like being underwater. And not doing which way the surface is.”

“Well, yeah. Folks hook up. Folks fall in love. Lots of folks get dusted, too. You learn not to hold on so tight.”

“Are you? With... somebody?”

“You mean did I fall off the face of the Zones, get out when I should be one hundred percent ghost, and sit in a fuckin' motel for days without even trying to find them? Witch. I'm not _that_ bad a boyfriend.”

Poison brushes back a lock of Ghoul's hair. Ghoul remembers, suddenly and vividly, their fingers against his face on the floor of the tower closet. But not like there's a good way to bring that up. _Hey, did I kiss you and not even remember it well enough to know whether it happened, or was I just having delusional romantic fantasies about you?_

Jet knocks again and leaves them some water and desiccated orange wedges – a goddamn delicacy. Probably trying not to spring dogmeat on Poison right away.

“The box says you're supposed to wash it out after twenty minutes,” Poison says finally. “My watch doesn't work out here.”

“Do I look like somebody who knows what time it is?”

Poison shrugs. “Now feels about right, I guess. Like the right time.”

The right time.

Ghoul rinses the dye and checks the cracked and dusty bathroom mirror. He's got a scab on his lip and a yellowed bruise across his cheek and it's still probably the best he's ever looked around Poison. He smooths his hair out as well as he can manage and opens the door.

“I was gonna like... go for... a drive, you know. And I thought that I... that maybe you'd... maybeyou'dwannacomewithme.”

Poison sits there, silently, one hand fidgeting with the brush. Ghoul wonders if he's fucked this up.

“Yeah,” they say. “Yeah. Let's go.”

The Trans Am paints a strip of light down the crumbling freeway. It's cold – real, healthy cold, not the clammy chill of the freezers. Ghoul glances over at Poison. They don't exactly look like a zonerunner, but they don't look like a citizen either – they've got a glint of wildness in their eyes, something Ghoul never quite imagined back in the city. But then, in his imagination at least he'd had something clever to say.

Poison reaches a hand out the window and spreads their fingers. “How long did it take you to learn to drive like this?” they ask.

“Like how?”

“Like... fast.”

“That's all the 'Am. We're just along for the ride.”

They close their hand into a fist, open it again, like they're testing something invisible in the Zone air. “Don't do that. You're good at things. Things that matter.”

“So are you.”

Poison laughs, but it's bitter. Fuck. Exactly the wrong fucking thing to say.

“I was good at making drugged-up citizens and fucked-up executives happy. And now I'm not even good at that.”

“I...”

Of course he'd fuck this up. Jet's the one who's good at making people feel better. And Kobra'd been too busy snarling at them all to feel bad about much of anything.

“Sorry. I shouldn't bring that stuff out here,” Poison says. “Probably gonna have worse to deal with soon.”

Ghoul's not sure what they mean, so he says nothing. Just drives till the road starts to fade, turns off the shoulder till the car's looking over the lip of the desert.

“Hey. You wanna see something?”

He climbs out and swings himself onto the hood of the Trans Am, and Poison follows.

“What did you –”

Ghoul leans back and points at the stars. They dust the sky like fragments of crushed diamonds, layers on layers of otherworldly light.

“We're all nothing out here,” Ghoul says. “Compared to that.”

He's not sure he ever expected to see the stars again, he realizes. He still remembers the first time he did – after the smog and lights faded from the city sky, when he was lying atop the ruins of some abandoned house with Jet. If he doesn't stop thinking so much now he's going to cry again, and he's done that too much in front of Poison already.

Poison is barely lit by the starlight beside him. They no longer smell of wealth or city, only dust and the harsh soap from their new jeans and a service-station jacket.

“Ghoul – I have to tell you something.”

Ghoul's heart quickens. “Yeah?”

“I met Korse in the freezers. After the girl. And he let me go – because he said I'd be back. He thinks I'm gonna sell you out.”

 _Of course._ It's always a game with the city.

“Yeah?” is all he can manage.

“I just – I wanted to say that I'm not going to. And... I want to know if you believe me.”

“Of course I do.” And he does, Ghoul realizes. He can already see the killjoy in them. Not the clothes or the hair but the reverence in the way they look at the stars.

“They're gonna come after us now. Twice as bad when they realize we've got the girl. I pissed them off and we've got something – somebody – they want. And we don't even know why. And look... I wouldn't blame any of you if you left me.”

“I...”

He grabs Poison's hand in the dark.

“I will never.”

A coyote howls in the distance, scavenging for dead things. Everything in the Zones dies too soon. If Ghoul is going to do anything, it has to be now – because who knows where they'll be tomorrow.

He draws Poison close and traces fingers through their hair, and Poison doesn't hesitate. They brace themselves against the hood and press their lips to Ghoul's, still tasting of citrus tang.

Heat surges in Ghoul's body. He runs his hand down Poison's neck and the worn fabric over their ribs, exploring the soft skin between their shirt and jeans. Poison's fingers ghost over his back. They stop at the row of staples across his tattoos.

“I don't want to hurt you,” they murmur.

Ghoul shakes his head, pulls Poison to lie beside him. He wraps an arm around them and stretches the length of his body against them, so close he can feel the beating of their heart.

“You won't.”

Poison slips their hand under his shirt. Ghoul has a flash of fear that it's going to feel wrong – like the executives prodding his bare skin. Instead he shivers with pleasure. He lifts his body just enough to let Poison take it off, wraps an arm around them and leaves kisses down their neck. Poison's fingers slide to the bone of Ghoul's hip, the rough fabric of his belt. They hesitate.

“I've... I've never done... anything like this. With anyone like you.”

Ghoul's body aches now with desire. He forces himself to pull back and look Poison in the eye, as well as he can look at anything in the darkness.

“I mean, we don't...”

Poison grabs his good hand and presses it to the hot inside of their thigh.

Ghoul finds their lips again and works his hand upward, between their legs, to the button of their jeans. He feels Poison's breath catch – quick, silent, almost surprised, as if they're just discovering their body exists.

“Lie back,” he whispers.

Poison rolls against the hood of the Trans Am, back arched as Ghoul unzips their jeans. He takes them in his mouth slowly, savoring the sound of their moan above him. It gives him the strange, objectively wrong feeling that he's never done this before. Like knowing he'll wake up with Poison tomorrow and do something mundane like eat breakfast with them has made it _different_.

Poison's hips buck beneath him. Their fingers stroke his freshly dyed hair. They come with a soft, gasping cry, body trembling with the aftershocks of it as they pull Ghoul up to straddle them, grab his wrist and draw him close against them. Their hand's between his legs, undoing his belt, his jeans, touching skin and he closes his eyes and moans into the hollow of their neck and Poison's strokes are slow, sure, like the brush against his hair and _yes_ he whispers into their ear and he can't stop _yesyesyes_ and he is sure so _fucking_ sure that he has never felt like this and

His body shudders. And for a moment the world is perfectly, utterly blank.

Then he is looking into Poison's eyes and saying almost without realizing it – 

“I love you.”

Poison doesn't miss a beat.

“I love you too.”

Ghoul lies with their arm around him, listening to the rhythm of their breath and the coyotes' chorus in the distance. He has never felt so vulnerable. He has never felt so goddamn invincible.

They should go back soon, he thinks, as Poison's grip goes lax with sleep. The girl will be waiting.

She might even have a name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who's had very kind words for this fic. It's the longest thing I've written by far and I've had a lot of fun working through it. Glad some folks have enjoyed it.


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